Social Influence and Customer Service

Posted • March 12, 2010 • 1 Comment

Does Social Influence have any Effect on Customer Service?

This is a guest blog post from social media strategist Taylor Ellwood

There’s a lot of hype made about social media and how it empowers the customer, especially when it comes to actually getting businesses to listen to what the customer has to say. But I’m a skeptic, and from everything I’ve observed, while social media is certainly a useful tool for connecting with people and building relationships and doing research on something you want, I don’t agree that it empowers the consumer as much as some other digital strategists argue that it does. And the reason for that is simple: Unless you have social influence, companies don’t care about your complaints.

That sounds harsh, but it’s also true. The news stories that get frequented about how people are using social media to embarrass companies and get them to actually perform real customer service occurs usually due to one overwhelming factor. That factor is how many followers a person has. For example, the president of Maytag recently called a blogger up and apologized for his company’s customer service and got her washer fixed, but only because that person had thousands of followers and had gotten those followers to support her, when Maytag’s customer service department refused to help her out. In another case, an artist’s work was ripped off by a company, and it was only when Neal Gaiman posted about it that the company even started to talk with her or offer some form of payment for her work.

My point is that while social media is a very public space, it does not guarantee that companies will provide better customer service or automatically care about what their customers think. Additionally with social media monitoring tools such as what Scout Lab provides, some companies can try to manage the negativity behind changing the rating toward them using some of the tools that social media monitoring companies provide. While this is a dubious practice at best, it is one that companies can use as a way of managing how they are perceived.

However, consumers can develop strategies of their own to get someone to listen. Finding someone who has a lot of social influence, and convincing that person of the worthiness of your cause can help to spread news about a company and its poor customer service. If enough people read and agree with the influencer then the company will have to respond, if only because the spike in negativity will embarrass them enough to make them listen to the original complaint and solve it.

However what ultimately would be ideal is if businesses simply learn to be proactive in their customer service, especially on social media sites. Social media provides consumers an opportunity to complain about a company very easily, but the company can choose to respond and try and solve the issue instead of just trying to avoid it or ignore it. Companies can also build on positive interactions by taking time to comment on a customer that mentions their brand. By building some positive social influence of their own companies can show that they actually care about their clients, and create customer service that actually serves the customer instead of trying to avoid the customer.

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