Insights

Brands and Marketers Won’t Ruin Social Media – Consumers Will

There’s a popular saying that marketers ruin everything. As a marketer, I agree and disagree.

Yes, crappy marketing by brands, or crappy marketers in general, ruin social media. Yet that’s been true of any crappy marketing, and it’s not restricted to social media.

Let’s face it, crappy anything ruins something.

A crappy experience with a customer service adviser who’s having a bad day can ruin your perception of a brand;
A crappy meal can ruin your special evening;
A crappy update of your favourite movie series can ruin your fond memories of what came before (I’m looking at you, George Lucas!!!).

But for some reason, marketers and brands are coming in for special attention recently, with many articles across the web decrying how social media has been ruined by brands and marketers.

For me, though, it’s not marketers of brands who have ruined social media – it’s consumers. Specifically, consumers who say they want brands to be a certain way on social media, but their [consumer] actions don’t back that up.

Why Are Marketers Being Blamed for Social Media’s Descent?

As I mentioned at the start of this post, the belief that marketers ruin everything, especially social media, is pretty popular and widespread. Run a search on Google for the term “marketers ruined social media” and you’ll get almost half a million results.

Some of the posts and articles include titles like How Marketers Ruined Social Media, What It Takes to Succeed at Social Media, Is Marketing Ruining Social Media?, and Don’t Pee in the Pool: How Digital Marketers are Ruining Social Media.

Spot any recurring themes there?

In addition to these posts, my friend and co-author on Influence Marketing, Sam Fiorella, published an interesting post the other day titled Social Media Has Killed Consumer Trust.

Sam uses graphs from Student Monitor that shares how US college students make decisions. The most trusted resource was still friends and word-of-mouth, with “information on the Internet” coming in at less than half the word-of-mouth percentage.

The takeaway was that social media, because of brands and marketers and their method of sponsored content, placing importance on numbers of followers, and using fake influence scores to determine authority, has been ruined by lazy marketing and poorly implemented tactics.

And on that, I agree. But do the actions of lazy marketers (and I use that term loosely when speaking about some of these “professionals”), who put more emphasis on quick hit, low return campaigns speak for all of marketing and brand engagement strategies?

No.

[clickToTweet tweet=”It’s not just lazy marketing to blame for social media’s fall from grace – it’s also consumers.” quote=”Much like you wouldn’t blame the dog for the stink coming from the cat litter box, don’t blame the wrong people for social media’s perceived downfall.”]

But it’s not just lazy marketing that’s to blame for social media’s so-called fall from grace – it’s consumers, and the demand for more personal and human interactions, and then crucifying the brands that do this.

Be Human, Except Don’t Be

One of the reasons social media was seen as turning point in the relationship between consumers and brands was that it finally allowed us, as consumers, to have a one-to-one conversation (or as close as) with the brands we do business with.

Yet, much like anything that affords people extra power, this can be (and is) abused. For example,

In 2009, I wrote about Doug Meacham, a consultant with IBM, and his hounding of the CMO of Best Buy regarding the price difference between offline and online sales. Doug was like an angry dog chasing a bone, and was the first time I’d seen the “power” of consumer-led abuse in action on social.

In 2010, when an 8 year old boy dying from muscular dystrophy and traveling on Air Canada had his custom wheelchair damaged by the airline,?Twitter lit up, led by a Canadian social media power player. Air Canada came in for massive abuse, and it seemed justifiably so – until you learned that Air Canada immediately sent the chair for repair when they saw its damage. Because the chair was custom-made, it couldn’t be repaired as fast as a normal chair, so they provided a manual chair (replaced the same evening with an electric one), while they tried to get the customized one repaired as fast as possible. Yet this wasn’t widely shared on social – go figure.

In 2011, social media guy CC Chapman went after Ragu in not just one blog post, but three, each one escalating a little more, because Ragu had reached out to Chapman about a new campaign they were doing involving dads, and Chapman took offense to the approach.

These are three early examples of consumers not only reacting to brands and their faux pas, but reacting in a way that essentially placed the brand in a no-win situation (just ask GAP when they crowdsourced a new logo on social media, and the response they got, for another one).

What each one does is show while consumers (even marketers are consumers away from the “day job”) want brands to be on social and be receptive, it’s actually more about being on social and on the consumer’s terms.

Does that sound like the kind of two-way interaction/relationship that social media was originally lauded for?

We All Need to Be Responsibly “Social”

Of course, times change. While social media may have been celebrated for its ability to connect consumers with brands, and vice versa, that relationship goal (or the perception of a relationship) has changed.

Eager to avoid a “social media fail” like the 89 million results a search for the term results in, brands lost their voices, and subsequently acquiesced to any and every little bit of criticism online. Even when brands were in the right, they’d apologize and advise they’d try do better.

[clickToTweet tweet=”We say we want brands to be more human on social media. Then we destroy them for trying.” quote=”The only thing to fear is fear itself. That, and being a brand on social media when the cards have been stacked against you before you even sit down at the table.”]

Sensing this, consumers have become more vocal, and even when they’re in the wrong, the groupthink mentality kicks in and the social media consumer “wins” pretty much every time.

When this happens, we all lose. Brands pull back from social, and the research and intelligence that can be gathered to improve the customer experience is lost.

While we, as consumers might celebrate the fact our publicly available data and updates aren’t being mined by brands, is it actually a victory? If it means crappy marketing strategies and questionable approaches to privacy are concerned, yes, it is.

But if a brand is answering queries on social media, and the consumer still craps on them for daring to provide the right answer, is it really the brand at fault?

Is it really the marketer who’s at fault for tailoring ads, offers and campaigns that a consumer has specifically said they want, and then that same consumer complains about seeing the promotion in their social feed?

Like I said earlier, it’s become a no-win situation for both brands and marketers on social, even when they’re doing things the way consumers say they want things to be done.

Ironically, perhaps the lazy marketers have got it right. After all, if brands spend a sizeable amount of money and personalized approaches to please the consumer, and still get beaten down for it, why bother? Why not just spray and pray like the crappy marketers have been doing for years?

Why indeed.

If we really want social to be the place it can be, we need to stop crapping on brands that try to do it right. Otherwise, it won’t be marketers and brands that ruin social media – it’ll be us, the consumer, by turning it solely into a soapbox for the loud and brash bully.

And that never works out well for anyone…

We Are the Creators of Hate

My kids are aged three and five . My daughter, Salem, is three and my son, Ewan, will be five in May.

Both of them go to school. Salem goes to a “pretend” school, meaning she goes to private daycare, and our daycare lady takes Salem to a little school each morning where other kids her age play and learn. It’s almost like junior junior kindergarten.

Ewan goes to full-day junior kindergarten (he started last summer) and has had a blast making new friends, learning new things, discovering who he is, and generally being a kid on a new adventure (much like his sister).

The friends and teachers that both Salem and Ewan are surrounded by are from every race, religion, and colour on our beautiful planet today – and yet neither Ewan nor Salem know this.

To them, they’re simply friends and teachers. There’s no Asian, no black, no brown, no other white kids, no Costa Rican daycare Nana for Salem, no Scottish dad, no Canadian mother.

Because, much like hate, kids don’t see black, white, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc – they simply see people.

So when does innocence and acceptance turn into hate?

Hate is Ingrained

When I was a kid living in Edinburgh, about 8-9 years old, it was in a very white neighbourhood. In fact, there was only one non-white family, an Indian family that lived across the street from us.

They had a little girl my age, who was in the class next door to mine. I’d never met her, had never spoken with her, never played with her – but I did have a singular impression of her, and that was that she was dirty.

Not dirty as in unwashed, but dirty as in smelly. This came from my great aunt, who would loudly and frequently say,

You have Indians living on your street? Make sure they don’t create a health hazard – smelly, dirty bastards.

While I wasn’t quite sure what a bastard was, even at eight I knew it couldn’t be a good thing, if it was tied to smelly and dirty. So, naturally, because my own family had said this (and my mum and stepdad had laughed and agreed), I saw the little girl across the street as dirty. Smelly. And probably a bastard.

It was only when I had to sit down next to her at lunch one day that I realized how wrong I was.

She was an angel. A beautiful, happy little girl who only wanted to be friends and fit in. Who didn’t smell. Who wasn’t dirty. And was clearly not whatever a bastard was.

My world was confused – how could this be? Looking back, I guess that may have been one of the points where I realized life was complicated and not as it seems.

We Are What We’re Told

One of my heroes, Nelson Mandela, has a wonderful quote, that has stayed with me ever since I heard it as a young man. The quote is below.

The key point that stood out for me when I first heard this was the part about us learning to hate, as opposed to being born hating – because it reminded me so much of my experience with my Indian neighbour and subsequent schoolfriend.

Before I got to know her, I’d already judged and would never have thought differently, because my family – my trusted educators – had taught me there was something undesirable about this little girl.

The same happened many times, in many shapes and sizes, as I was growing up.

My grandparents, my stepdad, my uncles, my cousins – they all told me that “the English are bastards, we hate them and all of Scotland does.”
My schoolfriends – based on what they’d been taught – made me believe that girls were stupid (intelligence-wise) and this is why they could only ever be any good in the kitchen, and to leave the real jobs for men.
My first boss made me believe that sexual orientation was wrong, if it was anything other than a man loving a woman, and a woman loving a man. Being gay wasn’t normal – instead, gay men were fags, gay women were ugly dykes, and they would all kill the human race through dirty behaviour.

This is the atmosphere I was brought up in. The atmosphere I was raised in, every day. The atmosphere my first entry into the adult world as a working person, contributing back to society, was presented as.

When all that is around you, and from the very people that are meant to be the ones that raise you right, is it any wonder we have so much hatred around us?

Change Your Stars

There are many different viewpoints on when children become critical thinkers, and don’t rely on the information put in front of them.

I’m not a scientist or psychologist, and would never claim to be one (nor is this post meant to offer that kind of advice – I merely want to start a discussion around how we combat hate).

However, I do buy into the belief that ages 10-12 is the core age when we’ve lost the ability to positively shape thoughts and ideas, as highlighted across at Parenting Science.

Primarily because it’s the immediate age before our teenage years kick in, where we are under so much peer pressure to fit in and conform if we want to be liked, and also because had I been able to avoid the kind of racism, bigotry and sexism that was in my childhood world, I may have been able to make better decisions long before I did.

It wasn’t until my late teens, when I went to University and finally moved out of home, that I realized much of all I had known and believed was wrong.

Gay men and women are not evil sexual destroyers – if anything, we (the “clean-living heterosexuals at all costs”) are;

Men are by far the more dumber of the two sexes, in many, many ways – just look at the misogyny around #Gamergate and the new Ghostbusters movie if you want further proof of how we, as men, continue to be dumb;

People of different colour, race and religion are just like you and me, often with the same dreams and goals – go figure.

Once I realized this, it broke my heart – because it essentially meant my life leading up to that realization had been a sham, a series of lies from a time gone by, from a family whose poisonous members were creating another purveyor of hatred.

And that hurt like hell.

But, as the father of Heath Ledger’s character in the movie A Knight’s Tale advises, we can always change our stars and be better people. We may have had our paths set for us, but that doesn’t mean they’re permanent – we have the power to change them.

The Question Is – Can We? Will We?

I’ll be the first to admit, as a young man alone in a different country (ironically, England – that place of so-called hated bastards…) it was scary trying to redo who I was.

My ingrained prejudices still came to the fore now and again, and it took me a long time to completely change the person I’d been taught to be. But it did happen.

We are responsible for the hatred we possess. Whether it’s as adults teaching kids, or adults finding our own place in the world, all we know is not always all we have to learn.

I’m not naive enough to believe that the hatred, vitriol, abuse, and everything else that’s inherently wrong with us as the human race will disappear anytime soon. But if we make more of an effort to allow and encourage open thinking, maybe we can start the process.

Teach kids non-gender neutrality

Yes, there will always be things that boys prefer and girls prefer, but colours and games aren’t necessarily the case. Why is pink only for girls and blue for boys? Why can’t my son play with his sister’s Princess toys (hint: he does, the same way my daughter plays with my son’s Thomas the Tank and Avengers toys). My wife and I are very determined to raise equal gender strength and opportunity kids.

Teach kids it’s okay to challenge

Yes, we want to raise our kids to be respectful of others, and that – for the most part – adults may know better, depending on how old the kids are. But make sure children know it’s okay to ask why, challenge the status quo, and not be brushed off with the “because you’re a child” routine. That teaches nothing.

Answer childrens’ questions about those that are “different”

In my son’s class, he has a friend who is permanently in a wheelchair. But he never asks why – because he’s never been taught that this is “different” because, simply put, it’s not. A child is in a wheelchair, and won’t be able to do some physical things the other kids can – but that’s all. In every other aspect, he’s a smart, funny, wonderful, and – yes – NORMAL kid. Because that’s who he is.

Present the atmosphere your child’s learning needs

I grew up in a household where my stepdad beat my mum, my sister, and me. He was a violent asshole, and the day he died was a day I celebrated. The atmosphere changed completely then, and I’m sure that helped settle my sister and I (although the bigotry and other crap was there, unbeknownst to me). Kids are smart – how we present life around them is what they’ll take into the world.

Like I said, I’m not a psychologist. I’m not trained in the mind, or how children learn. This post is from my own experience, what I learned and then had to unlearn.

I could have been an extremely hateful person. I’d like to think I’m not, and that – with my wife and the teachers we’re really fortunate to have educate our kids – my kids will grow up not knowing what hate is too (the word is banned in our house).

It’s not too much to ask, is it?

Introducing Hybrid Commenting (Or Why You Need to Keep Experimenting On Your Blog)

For the last four and a half years, I’ve primarily used the Livefyre Comments system for conversations after each post.

It’s no surprise my usage of Livefyre lasted so long – after all, I’ve written numerous times about how their service is second-to-none, and how their social integration is bringing content creators one step closer to closing the loop on the fragmentation of social conversations.

However, as much as I love Livefyre, I’ve decided to change the way we interact with each other here. This isn’t to say Livefyre has any issues – far from it.

But, as I’ve written before, we need to be aware of changing trends and preferences when it comes to how people consume our content, and this comes down to the comments as well as the content itself.

Hence the decision to go with hybrid comments here, using a mix of Google+ Comments and Inline Comments. Here’s why, and how you can use it for your preferred interactions.

The Medium Is?the Owner of the Message

A slight riff on Canadian media legend Marshall McLuhan’s famous “the media is the message” quote, the conversations around a blog post are no longer the sole domain of the blog post itself.

Instead of comments happening after the post, and after the post alone, now conversations and discussions are happening everywhere, from Twitter to LinkedIn Groups, from forums to Facebook, and – increasingly – on Google+.

While I wasn’t a fan of Google+ originally for thoughtful discussion, that changed around 12 months or so ago, as I cleared out a lot of the people I had been following, and made it a more eclectic collection of people, thoughts and interests.

Now, as much as I love comments on a blog post being on the blog so people can see everything in one place, I’m also seeing fascinating discussions around posts on Google+ – moreso than on Livefyre, where many comments would be from long-time community members.

Nothing wrong with this, but it did mean I was missing out on a lot of stimulating and challenging conversations on Google+.

Couple that with the fact that I’m seeing more traffic and interest from Google+ than before, it makes sense to switch out Livefyre for Google+ Comments, which is what you’ll see from now on at the bottom of each post.

But, like the post title says, I’m experimenting with hybrid commenting, so I’m not just limiting interactions to Google+ (given that many folks still don’t use Google+ regularly, if at all).

The Medium Approach to Comments

Ever since content platform Medium was launched in 2012, I’ve been a huge fan of much of their approach to content presentation and consumption.

For example, the design of this blog is very much an homage to the large feature image at the top of every post. The single column content approach here is also inspired by how Medium presents content, focusing the reader on the content and not distracting anyone with noisy sidebars.

But it’s Medium’s approach to comments that I probably love the most, and am implementing as the second part of the hybrid offering here.

Instead of leaving all the comments to the end of the post, Medium instead offers Notes which can be posted immediately alongside a paragraph or sentence. The beauty of this is the comment is instantly contextual, and about a very specific part of the post, as opposed to the more general comments that can appear in end-of-post comment boxes.

Given that my goal in 2015 is to make this blog an even more personal-led content channel, versus a marketing or social media-led blog, using this approach makes much more sense.

To that end, I’ve installed the Inline Comments plugin by Kevin Weber. This allows you to post a comment simply by using your name and email, and it’ll appear alongside the exact prose you’re leaving the comment about. An example can be seen below (click to expand).

As you can see, there’s a little comment bubble with the number “12” to the right of the main content. Click that, and the conversation happening around that specific paragraph is there.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Context is the connector between content and great comments. Make sure you’re fostering contextual discussions.” quote=”Context is the connector between content and great comments. Make sure you’re fostering contextual discussions.”]

It’s a clean, elegant way to interact. Most importantly, it’s contextual which, for me, is what great content and discussions are all about.

So How Do You Choose Which to Use?

Which system you prefer to use – Google+ or Inline Comments – is entirely down to your own preference. If you’re a regular Google+ user, then the G+ Comments at the end of the post would probably make more sense.

If you’re more about native WordPress comments, and keeping things simple (without the need to have a Google+ account), then obviously the Inline Comments would make more sense.

Both will give you instant notification when I, or another commenter, replies. On Google+, you’ll get an email to your Gmail account, and with Inline Comments, you’ll receive an email from me notifying you of any new replies to your comment. You can also subscribe to all comments, if you wish – just choose that option at the bottom of the Inline Comments area.

There are some things to keep in mind while I experiment with this set-up.

Inline Comments and my theme have a slight conflict at the moment, which means you’ll be taken to the top of the post when you leave a comment, as opposed to staying where you are on the page, and the comment loading through Ajax scripting.

Inline Comments aren’t mobile at the moment, so if you’re reading this post on your phone, you won’t see the Inline Comment bubble.

Hopefully, these are just minor quibbles that don’t impact your experience here if you want to try Inline Comments. Kevin, the developer, has advised he’s implementing a major uphaul of the plugin soon, so issues like these can be addressed.

In the meantime, if you want to leave an Inline Comment, and you’re reading on a desktop browser, you’ll see the comment bubble fade in as you scroll down the page. Simply click that where you want to leave a comment (I’ll leave some examples for you to see).

I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes, and please, do share your thoughts on this hybrid approach (either in Google+ at the end of the post, or through an Inline Comment).

After all, you’re just as big a part of this blog’s ongoing growth and experimentation as I am – so don’t be shy in letting me know what you think!

Note: Due to a current glitch between my theme and Inline Comments, I’ve reverted to native WordPress comments using wpDiscuz for now. Once the glitch is resolved, I’ll switch hybrid comments back on – thanks!

Customer Service is Not the Same as Being Customer-Centric

Last year, for an ongoing period of three months, I tried to to resolve a payment issue with a national?water heater service provider here in Canada.

When my wife and I moved home the previous summer, we switched from our current provider to Reliance, and took advantage of a special introductory offer that would see us receive nine months free rental.

Unfortunately, the sales guy completed the form incorrectly, and we only received eight months. Additionally, the payment amounts on the paperwork didn?t tally with the payment taken (early) from our bank.

So I contacted Reliance customer service ? or attempted to. That?s where the fun began.

Why Would You Make Your Customers Dizzy?

On attempting to call Reliance, I was placed in the phone tree from hell.

Did I want French or English?
Did I want customer service, sales, technical support, billing, rental, overdue payments, or arrange an appointment?
Did I have an account or did I wish to create an account?
Did I wish to speak to an operator or automated message?

A-ha ? the last option meant I was going to finally get somewhere, right? Wrong.

Do you wish to speak to a sales operator or a service operator?
Is this for your current bill or are you inquiring about payments?
Is this your account?

WTF?? Why would I call up to pay someone else?s account? This is getting ridiculous. But then the magic statement:

We are transferring you to an operator, please hold.

And, kudos to Reliance, they actually placed me through to an operator. Who promptly asked me for the account number I had just entered previously using the touchpad buttons on my phone that Reliance had told me to use!

Sense any frustration here? And this was the exact same process I?d gone through every time I?d called for the previous three months.

Add to that the fact that no-one called back with a resolution, even though that had been agreed between myself and Reliance?s customer service resolution team, and you might wonder about how customer service is defined at Reliance (or any other company that believes phone trees are still the answer).

What?s even more ironic is Reliance?s customer service statement on their website:

Our Vision:
We will change the way people think about our industries by providing vital products and services in innovative ways. Working together, we will lead the market in customer satisfaction.

A worthy mantra ? except using a phone tree with about 100 branches isn?t exactly innovative, nor does it encourage ??leading the market in customer satisfaction.?

While Mandy Champagne, a supervisor on the Customer Solutions team, eventually reached out to me?and credited the account with a goodwill gesture of an extra month?s usage, the whole experience was frustrating and made me reconsider our decision to move to Reliance.

It doesn?t need to be this way, either.

Becoming Agile With Customer-Centric Service

Back in 2010, I was tasked with a client?s customer satisfaction rating. They were a call centre for a leading smartphone provider, and their rating was awful. Since I?d led customer service teams back in the U.K. with leading mobile telco O2, the client was hoping I could improve their own team?s performance.

After reviewing their set-up, the problem became instantly clear ? they were wasting too much time on the little things, and the big issues were being left unresolved because of this.

Add in the fact their phone tree was even more archaic than the Reliance example I used earlier, and it wasn?t too surprising customers were hanging up and going elsewhere.

The solution was simple ? become agile and use better tools to provide a truly customer-centric experience.

The social media solution

My team discovered that around 80% of the problems were simple, relatively minor calls. How to set up voicemail, how to access the app store, etc. We also discovered that many of the customers were on social networks, especially Twitter.

So we allocated around 20% of the call centre team to Twitter to answer these questions, and we had direct links to FAQs and graphic guides to direct the customer to. The result ? dropped call stats fell by half, and customer satisfaction rating went up by 67%.

The channel solution

As well as the social media approach, we implemented a survey of our client?s customers, either when they called in, by direct email, or via Twitter (sharing a link to the survey). This was to determine how they would like the resolution team to contact them.

This ensured two things ? the social team could concentrate on the small stuff while the resolution team not only worked with the customer directly, but on their preferred channel (phone, email, letter, etc.). This was a key moment in the strategy, and saw the client win an award in both customer rating and escalated call resolution.

The pro-active solution

As well as using Twitter for dealing with simple issues, we also trained the technical service team to use social monitoring platforms. This allowed them to take control of any mentions of the brand negatively, and jump into the conversation to see how they could help, as well as arrange a solution.

We also monitored how the customer had been treated at one of the client?s resellers; and we monitored competitor conversations and directed the sales team to potential leads.

The result ? new activations increased by just over 30%, and better education tools were sent out to resellers. Additionally, tech calls dropped by 14% in the first six months, since the tech support team were handling and solving issues online.

And the client phone tree that had previously been in use? That was restructured to three simple choices ? customer service, tech support and sales. Simple, clean, and direct to a relevant company agent.

Since 2010, the client has continued to improve processes and is regularly cited as one of the best in class in the mobile communications market for customer service and best practices using social media.

Your Customers Are Your Brand

The example with the mobile client isn?t a unique one, nor were the solutions anything majorly innovative ? it was simply a matter of looking at what was going wrong, and turning the company into a truly customer-centric one.

We can talk all we want about great marketing initiatives, and crisis communications, and how cool our products are ? but if none of that rubs off on our customers, we won?t be talking about the cool stuff for very long.

Customer service, and how you treat your customers, is the biggest, most organic method of marketing your brand will ever use. Frustrate them, and you will lose them. Work with them, and you will build advocacy more effective than any marketing or customer acquisition budget could ever hope to offer a return on.

Your customers are your brand ? and you wouldn?t let your brand suffer, would you?

Speed of Resolution Over Speed of Response is Key to Social Media Success

For a lot of consumers, companies that can respond within minutes on the social sphere send out a far more positive message than those that dilly-dally.

But does this type of instant response really benefit us, both as customers and brands? While this speed might be something that would always exist in an ideal world, unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world.

Not only that, but by setting these expectations, we’re also?setting companies up?to fail by jumping to action as soon as their name is mentioned.

It’s why, instead of the speed of response,?it’s speed of resolution that should really define how successful a company is in social media (or any other business medium).

The Problem With Speed of Response

In an ideal world, we (as consumers) would have answers to our questions almost as soon as we’ve asked them. If we have a problem with a product, it’ll be resolved immediately.

Or we have a complaint – it’ll be heard and acted upon quicker than you can say, “Sorry, sir/miss/madam, we’ll get onto that right away.”

But the desire for that kind of brand interaction?falls short of the realistic one, for several reasons.

Legal red tape

You’d think that a simple, “We’re sorry you feel that way, and we’ll look into this for you” would suffice as an acceptable way to cover a customer issue. And it should be.

The problem is, if it’s an issue that involves legal counsel, everything has to be approved. Everything. Even a simple “We hear you”.

Because if a multi-million dollar lawsuit is the potential outcome (especially involving a pharmaceutical company, for example), then the?company better make damn sure everything is documented and carried out to the letter of the law.

Locale and culture differences

Say you’re a consumer in Canada, but the main team you need to speak to is in China. So there’s a time difference to start with. There are also different cultural holidays; so response times are immediately affected.

The issue of scale

Sure, we’d all like to think our companies?(either own, employed or those we buy from) are the biggest on the market, so we should expect a 24/7 every-minute-of-the-day personalization level. But that’s never going to happen.

There are only so many people a business can employ and still make a profit, while allocating the right resources to customer care and crisis communications. Timescales will always be governed by numbers.

There are more reasons why the speed of response isn’t necessarily a core ingredient to a business’s success; but these three are the most common starting points. And ones that dovetail nicely into…

The Preferred Option of Speed of Resolution

Generally, consumers are smart people. We understand businesses have other customers, and that sometimes we’re maybe making a bigger deal of something than it deserves.

Yes, we’re also antsy assholes at times – but, generally, we offer leeway when we feel we’re being listened to. And “listened to” isn’t the same as “hearing”.

A company might hear me, and offer a speedy pat response, just to show that they’re listening and responding to social media standards. The problem is, a pat response shows why?being heard?is completely different from?being listened to – nothing is usally fixed. The same issues that were there before are still there now.

However – switch that around and listen to my problem and resolve it within an acceptable timeframe? That’s far more benefecial to me than giving me faux customer love.

But that still leaves the response time issue, no? Not necessarily.

If you’re a brand, make it clear on every single customer touchpoint what your practice is for issues and queries:

Standard customer service issues will have a response within 2-3 hours.

Identified escalated issues requiring further investigation will have a response within 12-24 hours.

Emergency issues or concerns that have health implications will have a response within the hour (if not immediately, based on the issue).

Make it clear too, that a response is not the same as a resolution. Offer timescales for internal procedures to let customers know that, to get the answer they need to really resolve the issue, the process is X departments and Y amount of days, to get to Z resolution options.

Also, make it very clear that you’re monitoring countless hundreds (if not thousands) of conversations around your customer base, and that sometimes a query or question may be missed.

In that case, have an easy contact option on your business website where customers can follow the same process as social media questions, but accept that the time to reply will be dictated by submission time.

We Don’t Need You To Be Fast – Just Right

Ask the majority of customers what they prefer from the two – a speedy response, or a speedy resolution, and more times than not you’ll get the latter as the preferred choice.

It’s why customers will wait in line at the Apple Genius Bar, as opposed to going to the local computer store – they know the longer?waiting time?means a quality service where they’ll get their problem sorted first time, as opposed to a quick buck band-aid that leads to even more issues down the line.

While not every company can be an Apple, most consumers will prefer service like an Apple customer. And speed of response has never been Apple’s modus operandi.

Maybe that’s something we can all learn from, businesses and consumers…