This morning in stumbled on an awesome infographic from @TWCableHelp about their social support process. I have to hand it to Time Warner, the explination is well executed and the stats are impressive – big kuddos to their social team. Problem is, I live in an community with over 750 units that Time Warner serves and I can’t recall hearing many [any?] positive comments about them.  Their support team’s doing all the right things yet it’s not fixing the perception problem.

As social has gone from something the business world laughs at [anyone who pitched the value of a user community before 2006 knows what I’m talking about] to the place where everyone has to be we’ve lost a little clarity in the middle – [corporate] social doesn’t fix your underlying problem, it merely treats the symptoms.

• Got a defective product? The one you replaced for Sally via twitter is just going to break again.
• Service keeps going out? Facebook updates don’t make your 2 million fans any happier, just wise enough to know to head to a friend’s house to use their alternative provider.
• Activists don’t think you’re up to par on ethical values? A couple blog comments won’t reverse that

What social can do, and does a great job of, is allowing you to bandaid the issues. If you’re  lucky the cut is small enough that the bandaid holds it back and let it heal back up. You can’t increase product quality via twitter but you can issue a recall, troubleshoot issues and resolve them in near real time. That’s a great and thanks to 1:1 interaction earns you back some of the credibility you lost – the scar however does not go away.

But for every customer who tweets, facebooks, yelps, blogs or posts openly many more complain in “social silence” – that is to say, they post or share a comment to a network you can’t see, can’t measure and can’t touch.  That’s where the problem festers and eventually grows from a couple bad experiences to a bad perception.

What Time Warner’s social team is doing should be applauded. It’s the right step for their support / marketing department to help upset customers on their own terms and something I wish more brands I used did; but it only helps as far as a bandaid can.

Many of us, probably all of us, are guilty of driving social programs that try to mask a deeper problem. I’ve certainly done it. And why not? It’s a direct solution, something we can do fast, and justify back with engagement counts and posts. In a world where executives and shareholders want to see us all using the latest and greatest social media is what gets the funding, the attention. But you can’t scale responding to problems. You can’t hire enough nice people or give out enough coupons to make up for a problem that won’t go away.

Instead of building up autonomous social support teams with the blessing of the C-levels, that momentum and interest needs to be taken into improving the full experience. Product to fulfillment to marketing to support. Only then can a company really expect their social support team to be empowered enough to be able to help grow the business, otherwise we’re just stuck with bandaids and eventually those fall off.

Related reading (aka others have said something like this before me)

Social Media & customer service: Are you scalable? – Smart Blogs

Are You Using Social Media as a Band-Aid for Poor Customer Service? – Right Place Marketing

The social media band aid mentality – The Email Guide