A theme that came up again and again during our London/Cambridge Traveling Geeks tour was that social media, and especially those that provide “immediate” access to company representatives (such as Twitter), are really changing not only how fast a company can respond to customer questions and problems, but are relocating (dislocating?) where the control of the customer relationship resides within many companies. Twitter provides 24/7 access to company representatives (if they’re actually online), and it shifts the decision point or the point at which the company takes responsibility for a problem, outward from the PR department and “C-level” executives (CEO etc.) to the actual front lines where the company’s employees are talking with the customers! Here’s what Robert Scoble said about this in a roundtable held in Cambridge on Friday. The sponsor of this session, Omobono, also has put up a page about the Traveling Geeks visit.
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[…] as the social/mobile web grow, people demand information sooner and sooner. In terms of business, customer support are changing the way they operate to better accomodate consumers’ needs. Smartphone-based scanning and intelligent information discovery, as Mashable notes, will only […]
Another interesting observation. There is no doubt from my own experience at Carphone Warehouse that complaints that originate via Twitter are picked up much more quickly, and we even have examples of ‘bystanders’ to the problem bringing such complaints to our attention. With customer service agents increasingly now operating on this twitter frontline, the need for organisations to trust in and truly empower their employees to make decisions is even greater.