S.O.S. Tweets & New Leadership

I read an article recently called Twitter Comes to the Rescue, in the NYT (http://tiny.cc/21pLZ ). The article is about travelers with a whole lot of Twitter followers getting fast responses from airlines and hotels after tweeting publicly about bad service. As you can imagine, the tweets range from airline middle seat anxiety to slow room service delivery to everything in between. Companies like JetBlue and Southwest Airlines that have responded quickly to the tweeters in distress are proud of their quick thinking and savvy online interventions.

So what is wrong with this picture? Well, for one thing I started wondering what happens to the customers that don’t have thousands of Twitter followers. Should Twitter customers with a large following get preferential treatment, while other passengers and hotel guests wait on the customer service phone lines for nearly an hour?

We know that Twitter users with many followers can exert power. They wield the threat of public exposure and embarrassment for a company that provides poor service. These travelers will use their influence to get better service, and who can blame them? They have the luxury of circumventing the customer service department, a response mechanism that is often broken. The reality is that even with all these new, cool and fast communications channels, what we have here is a failure to communicate.

We need to rethink the definition of customer service. In the age of Twitter, bad customer service quickly morphs into bad publicity. That is because tweets become re-tweets, and bloggers and journalists pick up the thread of a problem and amplify it. So instead of responding only to high profile customers in order to protect a company’s image, why not use the same medium to reach out to all customers? Maybe it’s time to enlarge the definition of customer service.

For example, should the primary customer service channel always be over the phone? Why is there such a long wait time? Can we empower customer service agents to tweet updates that make things easier for customers, and to instantly respond to problems. Can we authorize customer service to use a common sense approach, and give them the authority to override systems to fix the issue at hand? Should companies use online mediums as a matter of course, to find creative solutions to everyday problems? Rethinking the role of customer service would have the added value of making the service providers feel that they are part of the rescue, not the problem.

Leadership is what is missing from this equation. I know that companies want to head off the online conversations as quickly as possible, in order to make people with a Twitter megaphone happy. But obviously it is in the best interest of companies to make all of their customers happy. Leaders need to instill these values into their organizations, and change processes as necessary to make it a reality. Then they won’t need to worry about a few bad tweets.