December 14th, 2010 
Ankita Gaba 
So I tweet “Tata Photon Plus’s customer service sucks big time”. To my surprise Tata Photon Plus on twitter responds asking me if they can be of any help.
I describe my issue to which they have a common reply.
And this has been their standard response I can see on twitter.com/tataphotonplus .
My initial thoughts were,
- Why would a brand use a Gmail id for customer care?
- If they have to direct people to an email id, why be on twitter anyway?
Me being me, I asked them to solve my issue on twitter and their answer was that they have a protocol to follow.
Nevertheless I emailed them, after all they at least made the initial effort to be on twitter, only to know that I can feel free to call their customer care number to solve my issue.
However this is not a post where I am being just another disgruntled customer. The point I am trying to make here is, why do brands need to follow a protocol for customer service/support/care on social media.
How different is a call centre customer care to a twitter customer care. In fact twitter is public and one wrong step could fire back. I don’t see any protocol followed when I call the call centre. The customer care executive solves my issue over the call. Why give the step motherly treatment to twitter/social media.
If your offline customer care is well routed and is many a times internally managed, if not it is at least well integrated with your systems and business verticals, why not replicate that to social media.
So let’s jot down some bullet points that go in favour of integrating your social media customer service into your other processes-
- Quick response time is always appreciated. This is only possible if it is not an agency managing your twitter account.
- Internal resource will be at a better position to handle the query than your outsourced team
- If the outsourced team again directs the troubled user to the offline customer care channels, you are only ending up increasing the time of response and adding one more unnecessary step towards solving a users problem
- You can cut cost by directing users that have similar problems to say a trouble shooting blog post that you have written.
- You can also cut cost by encouraging brand evangelism. Many a times in a very active community I have seen loyal users assist other users, solve their queries, fire fight even before the brand reaches to that conversation.
- You can further cut cost by managing more queries in the same stipulated time than that of the agency.
- If it’s a product issue you can internally share the feedback with the product development team, if it’s an idea it can be forwarded internally to the R&D team. All of this information just gets lost somewhere between your communications with the agency.
Sadly, the harsh reality is that marketers still think that the primary benefit or reason for them to be on active on social media platforms as a brand is to either acquire customers or increase current consumption.
Convinced that it should be managed internally? Can you think of any other reasons why Social media should be integrated in your business functions? Please feel to disagree and have a healthy debate by commenting on this post.
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First thing first.
Gmail? TataPhotonPlus, in the eye of a million $ 2G scam and you can’t host the mail on your domain. Understandable for a smaller organisation, but . .
Anyways, that’s not what the post is about. So lets move on.
Now the big problem everywhere is that Social Media is most often combined with the term marketing, thereby making SM = SMM, which of course is not the case. Social Media is a platform which brings together different functions of an organisation at one place and gives them the opportunity to connect with the audiences better.
Marketing,PR, sales, customer support, HR and any other arm that directly deals with people thus becomes a part of the social media ‘campaign’ of an organisation.
As for managing social media internally or outsourcing to an organisation, there are various factors that come into play here. Company size to requirements to frequency of activity and a whole lot of other issues will eventually help decide what is better for the organisation – agency or in house.
Most important takeaway from the post is that brands should focus on more objectives than just taking care of ‘branding’.
Thanks for the comment Prateek.
I somewhere agree that its a call that the brand should take depending on a lot of factors.
But we definitely are on the same page when we say that “brands should focus on more objectives than just taking care of ‘branding’.brands should focus on more objectives than just taking care of ‘branding’.” Lets hope brands are ‘listening’
Oh yes almost forgot that, ‘Listening’ is another thing that many Indian brands at least seem to be ignoring. Facebook ‘fans’ is all that their campaign starts and stops at.
Oh yes, That is the MOST irritating part. Most briefs that I get are one line briefs – “I want to do Social media on facebook”
“Do” social media on Facebook takes SMM to a whole new plane altogether.
Really sorry that you did not get a proper response on Twitter. So we’ll not ask you to mail us or reply on twitter. We’ll get back to you on twitter basis information already shared.
My issue was a few months ago. Nothing that I am facing now.
To use Twitter as a platform for customer care is a very difficult task until and unless as you have said it is being handled by someone internally who can respond quickly but again the trouble is that the problem may be mayraid like a problem in billing or some technical issue both are different types of problems and cannot be handled by the same person online it has to be directed to a third person which is offline. I am not saying it is entirely impossible but it has to be refined. What I have always felt is that brands instead of using Twitter as a customer care tool they must use it as a feedback gathering tool or a marketing research tool. Twitter or any other platform will be more productive that way.
@vivek13th
I beg to differ. There are lots of tools available to make sure the processes smoothen out.
I would like to share a recent personal experience with Airtel. I was facing network issues and for 3 days struggling with them over their offline customers care channels. On the third day I tweeted to Airtel. My problem was completely offline and so was it’s solution. That din’t stop Airtel from approaching me and solving it. They responded back, asked for my number. And within a couple of hours I got a call from their corporate office. Details were taken down and the next day the area manager was sent to my place to check the network in my house and area. Post which I also got a follow up call to check whether the issue was resolved.
http://twitter.com/ankitagaba/status/12045765505458176
http://twitter.com/ankitagaba/status/14201839947878400
I would say that my issue was solved on twitter itself. Because after tweeting I practically had to do nothing.
This is because their internal systems and twitter are integrated.
PS- Their twitter handle is Airtel_Presence, and the email id they use to respond is airtelpresence@airtel.in. *Claps*
good to know it can be done and it is being done. thanks for sharing.
Hi Ankita,
Nice article. But I disagree on a few points
1. Customer Care is something which is always outsourced. SM customer care is no different from a Call center customer care hence it needs to be outsourced. (When it comes to managing brand damage it needs to be done by good quality resources). For Tata or Airtel this is not there core business activity.
2. Why cant they solve the problem on twitter? (to reduce further brand damage, u already bitched about the brand, they dont want further damage, according to me a good damage control strategy).
3. Dont know about TATA but Airtel solves complaints on twitter much faster. I think they have a special customer care team working on emails they get from Twitter users.
I agree with Prateek, Brands are more bothered about the number of fans. There are many FB pages where people dont interact or answer queries. The protocols of agencies should be tightened and the agency model will survive only if they work for direct clients and not cut corners by further outsourcing to another agency.
You can further cut cost by managing more queries in the same stipulated time than that of the agency.?? How??
Thanks
1] The answer to this point lies in your 3 point. Even if’s it outsourced it is important to integrate it with your internal systems. Offline channels are outsourced. But they are deeply rooted into the system. Technology has been built to make this feasible. Why not for twitter then? I bet it’s outsourced for Airtel too, but they solve it faster because they have a team internally who is in close contact with the agency and like I said ” it is integrated with their existing systems”
2]By solve it on twitter I meant, do not send the user back to the offline channel. I shared with Vivek a recent personal experience I had with Airtel.
“I was facing network issues and for 3 days struggling with them over their offline customers care channels. On the third day I tweeted to Airtel. My problem was completely offline and so was it’s solution. That din’t stop Airtel from approaching me and solving it. They responded back, asked for my number. And within a couple of hours I got a call from their corporate office. Details were taken down and the next day the area manager was sent to my place to check the network in my house and area. Post which I also got a follow up call to check whether the issue was resolved.
http://twitter.com/ankitagaba/status/12045765505458176
http://twitter.com/ankitagaba/status/14201839947878400
I would say that my issue was solved on twitter itself. Because after tweeting I practically had to do nothing.
This is because their internal systems and twitter are integrated.
PS- Their twitter handle is Airtel_Presence, and the email id they use to respond is airtelpresence@airtel.in. *Claps*”
So you see, for me it was solved on twitter!
3] And that’s exactly how it should be! [whether outsourced or not]
This is just a sad state, that brands outsource to agencies, and agencies outsources it to someone else.
“You can further cut cost by managing more queries in the same stipulated time than that of the agency.?? How??”
By cutting down the turn around time. I shoot a query, the agency picks it, shares it with brand,brand responds to agency, agency responds to me. I see this happening for a couple of my existing clients.
Agreed TATA doesnt use their official id which is a #fail. Airtel uses an official id. The twitter Customer care is redirected to the email support team who take these mails as priority. So it is integrated to the systems of the call center/email support team. I think you just reiterated what I said. Even airtel asked u to send an email (which is taking the convo offline, great strategy to reduce further damage online). TATA doesnt have good processes in place thats it. So We cannot generalize that the processes should be handled internally. The twitter team is just redirecting traffic to email support team (which is a third party or agency) who have access to internal servers/database/CRM and they take mails from that id as a priority.
@bharat Airtel din’t ask me to email, they took my contact details over DM and then called me. For me everything was done on twitter.
And wrt to it being handled internally, as far as the outsourced systems are in place and queries are managed like the offline queries are I think you and me are on the same page
Ok couple of months back they asked me to email and that was the ‘protocol’ they were following then. Now I think they have a SCRM in place to handle from twitter directly. It eventually boils down to the fact that online reputation kills the brand if not handled properly. TATA is committing a suicide now, they need to tighten their processes.
A very good case study by Ankita! She already knows my views on this
But just to summarise:
1. I do not think that customer support on Twitter is a scalable approach. In the end, when Twitter users increase and everyone posts on Twitter .. brands would again see delays in replying back to complaints. This is because of two main reasons:
A) Repeat cases
Even if I solve a problem on Twitter now, and a user has the same problem or query again, I will again have to give him instructions which is a waste of time and hence money. There are no options to categorise / tag tweets like FAQs, Server Down, Subscription Cancel etc. and hence no way for user to search around and find the answer in one go
B) 140 chars limit
Hence, you would always have to go another platform in the end to solve things. Kills the purpose, doesnt it?
I truly believe that like many other ways, the final solution here is to harness the crowd .. use the crowd and let them solve each others problems. Communities like Get Satisfaction and Jive are great for this purpose.
http://getsatisfaction.com/case_studies/widgetbox/
http://getsatisfaction.com/case_studies/seriousbusiness
Thanks Aditya.
All your points are valid, very valid. Let’s hope the numbers grow as much that brands need to adopt to tools like getsatisfaction.
Rao- I agree with your crowd sourcing point.
1. If people post more, you increase the no of people handling the complaints so traffic is not an issue.
Point A: Same is the case with offline methods, if your problem is not solved by customer care executive you would call him back and ask for alternative solution. Through the CRM they can send across standard answers for problems by redirecting them to certain solution links which will solve the 140 character problem (I have seen an agency doing this for ICICI)
Thanks bongu!
You can always increase your customer support executives .. but my point was whether it is the right approach. We are trying to do the same with our BPOs .. but they clearly arent perfect ..
IMHO
It is completely going to depend on a company’s philosophy, it depends on whether they really care about their customers. Some companies have the philosophy of solving problems in less than a min at the same time some companies dont care and they make ppl wait. Especially in the case of telecom providers with portability coming in I am sure the customer service will be improved. Almost all providers have similar offers (tariffs) what would matter in the future is customer service and quality of service which they would provide.
And it is not always the agency’s fault it depends on how transparent the client is and how interested they are in handling customer queries/complaints online.
I never said it’s the agency’s fault
I was from an agency remember?!
The post show how Indian brands are failing to use Social Media to its fullest advantage. The clarity over objective of Social Media campaigns is haze, no doubt. But IMO its too early to be too harsh on them, as India is still an evolving market as far as usage Social Media for business is concerned.
My 2 cents on the mentioned case:
Its heart warming to see that the brand mentioned in this post had their listening strategy in place, though its response time/model was poor. As you rightly pointed out, their engagement strategy is flawed. Directing you to an email id, from where you are further directed to offline channels doesn’t make sense. In that case, they need not have responded to you at all. By the way I strongly believe in co-existence & integration of online-offline channels, but this case is too far fetched.
Now if the account is handled by an outsourced team and they are not equipped to handle customer queries, I would suggest a more customer centric approach like asking the customer to DM their contact number and business contacting them (assuming that the query can only be addressed through offline channel, like in this case).
Harsh blogposts like these will change the scenario is what I am hoping.
The agency also responded and now they have a new email- social@tataphotonmarketing.com thanks to my post