6 months after getting the iPhone 4 I took it rock climbing and put a nice big crack in the front. Everything worked but needless to say I’ve been counting down the days until the new version was announced… 5, 4s, 2011… As much as I wanted the curved design, the features were almost irrelevant.

But while my upgrade decision has been stable, my carrier choice, not so much… Not [just] for the usual AT&T complaints but because half of my new apartment flat out doesn’t get a bar of service. So, while my contract may not be up, it seemed worth the termination fee to make a jump.

And then came an [unexpected] great customer service moment

After reading tweets from @DannySullivan and some “unknown” friends, I prepared for a battle on the phone, to push through a wall of counter arguments from one of AT&T’s “resolution specialists” [seriously, that’s their I.V.R. greeting]  and all the usual drama you expect when calling a company. My experience has always been that these “service” battles actually make it easier to cancel out of sheer frustration, but none the less, it’s a painful experience to know you’re walking into.

But after a few minutes on hold and giving out all of my personal information again the rep didn’t fight me. Instead he merely asked what the issue was and when I explained the lack of signal coverage, he apologized. Rather than going into a pitch, he then told me the cancelation cost [$325 - $10 / month of service was $175 for me] and how to cancel to insure a smooth transition of my number, how to get a hold of AT&T after the change for any issues, etc. Only as he was finishing up did he finally throw in a “I realize this won’t fix your signal issues but if you want to stay I can offer you a small credit off your bill, if not…”

Attitude. That’s what good service is about.

The rep offering me $75 wasn’t a deal breaker; heck that’s well less than a month of service between my minutes, texting and data + tethering package. Verizon’s service doesn’t work great here either [why there’s poor coverage in a “upscale” apartment community with 750+ units is beyond me] but between their trade-in programs, a better service reputation, and just being a different experience I was willing to jump ship despite the added cost until the rep, and thus AT&T, demonstrated commitment to me as a customer. Sadly commitment has become a rare thing these days.

The rep did everything other than what I expected. He was polite and legitimately apologetic. He provided the information I wanted first, an offer last. And when I took him up on it, he made the process seamless, taking the order, getting the right information, providing the little details [like the fact that the phone may just show up after the 14^th despite what websites say]. As icing on the cake, he also noticed that – for a reason which he didn’t know – I’m getting another $75 credit from AT&T in a few months for having an iPhone with my particular history… a retention bonus… we all know keeping a customer is far cheaper than replacing them.

iPhone ordering makes for great case studies because, between millions of experiences, you have the best and worst service scenarios all coming together around one constant. The apple website should be a prime example to every single etailer of how you make a shopping experience – the selection process is about a solution, not a shopping cart; the up-sells appear as value-adds and never stand in your way; the form fields are minimal and rarely error on a legitimate entry [like a special password or unique address]; and between split payments, multiple-financing options, and gift cards, it’s just as flexible as shopping in store. On the other hand you’ve got stories from the carriers of nightmare hold times, conflicting upgrade information, insanely high costs, near arguments over account features, discrepancies in warranty offerings & information… all in one ordering experience.

I didn’t expect to have a blog-worthy experience in upgrading a phone but what AT&T did goes beyond their service, iPhones or the cell industry – the sad reality is that we, as consumers, have come to expect our opinions to be practically ignored, to be hard-sold by someone reading off a script with 3 different levels of service and to be brushed aside with generic response. Despite all the talk of being social & transparent, most of customer service is still about getting the issue to a “closed” status rather than actually engaging to understand, acknowledge and learn from the issue.

The truth is you can’t always fix the root problem a customer is having but when you allow your reps to be honest, friendly, informative, and let them decide how to handle a negative based on their expertise doing this hour after hour, you do what customers don’t expect… care.

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Unfortunately I didn’t get the rep’s name; but if anyone from AT&T reads this, email me and I’ll give you the order number as he deserves a thanks.

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

On one hand you have your customer service team, a group accustom to working with customers, tasked with fixing problems and [hopefully] knowledgeable about your product, policies and other particulars.

On the other hand you’ve got marketing which is probably the group driving social and has the most access to specials, new campaign information and the juicy details the customer wants.

The problem with delegating out to customer service is that, unless you create new roles and train new staff, you’re responding 1 to 1 on a platform that’s seen by 1 to many. This may seem like a minor issue but when your response ends up on the front of a major blog it’s anything but. Marketing on the other hand is often out of touch with the details of the customer experience (and I’m saying this as a marketer) so getting into support requires learning those find points. Neither side is perfect.

The solution that I’ve always found to work best is the one that gets the customer what they want – the right answer, in the right format fastest. Whether this comes from marketing or customer service isn’t a matter of black or white, it’s a matter of who can do it and who can commit the time to checking Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Your Blog, The Other Blog, the new video site, the old video site, the second twitter account and that one last blog all the time. If your entire customer service team is hourly it’s not going to be them. If your marketing team isn’t willing to get into the trenches they should stick to strategy.

Either way you slice it the best idea is always to carve out that person. This can be a new resource if budget allows or an existing repurposed one. New clearly has the advantage of being able to get trained and focus on nothing else but sometimes that long time employee who is looking for a new change of pace already has the insights to know how to answer the product questions.

What’s most important, the detail you can’t forget ever is that people who contact you through social are doing so because it’s the channel they chose to use. If your resource doesn’t check it frequently, doesn’t respond well or just ends up pushing them to other channels there’s no use in having them there so whoever you pick, they need to have the permission and backing of the company to go out, give answers and perhaps use a little different tone or brand than may be the status quo – after all, this is social media.

As an example I needed to contact Facebook about removing a fake page today and starting an ad campaign. The two items were closely related yet it took me more than 15 minutes to find a contact form. To make matters worse there was so little support involvement that all of their user engagement support tools were filled with complaints and unanswered questions – that didn’t help my impression one bit. When I finally got to the contact form the auto email stated that not everyone would be responded to. Why even let me send an issue if you’re going to start the process by scaring me off. Now I know Facebook has a great team but that message isn’t getting across and that makes it harder for me to do , or want to do, business with them.

Services is about the long term result.
It’s easy to get into a situation of over measurement. What’s the cost of a single support call, what’s the benefit of each call to immediate order volume, is there an upsell, etc… All of these measurements seem great but they miss the single most important part of marketing – the customer experience.

Just as we spend hour after hour optimizing our sites and business models to get people from point A to the sale, the same is necessary for your service process. Zappos has discovered that while they may lose money in the short term on a customer call or phone order that discussion makes it for them in the long term. By engaging and providing support customers become more loyal and more interested in what the agent has to say and a hard sell turns into a soft sell. An easy return turns into another order for more money and on and on.

It’s an all or none game.

Simply going part way and making it easier to get ahold of someone doesn’t solve the problem. To succeed in providing truly good service you have to enable it from the very start to the very end – easy to find phone numbers, very few if any menu options on the phone, available alternative methods like chat, friendly and well trained reps, access to someone who speaks the right language, and of course people who can get things done. This is the cost and this is the big investment that most companies can’t get past.

But what happens when you skip these essential and put more junior people on the phone, outsource or simply don’t enable? We all know what happens as we’ve all been there. A customer trying to chat with an agent who gets broken English will never respect the brand the same. Another customer who has to wait 10 minutes for help will be more likely to return than to evangelize.

As an example I’ve recently had some issues with my HP laptop. Since this is a home machine I’ve been relegated to web support for help (phone support is closed too early to be useful). To HP’s credit the response time has been amazing but their techs are clearly outsourced to a far off country and it shows in their understanding of key phrases and their usage of English. Being in America would not make things perfect but there are some sentences that are just so odd that I can’t help wondering if the agent gets me at all. Their only real redemption in my experience was the last agent in the process who skipped some un-needed steps to get my issue escalated. That was real action it but it took many other agents before I got someone who understood me enough to truly help. As a result while I love the interface of my computer and design of the new models, I’ve shopped with competitors lately for my replacement machine.

Customer Service is Marketing

On the other hand when you do provide a truly a-z service experience you’ll discover that people market it for you. I’m not the first person to mention Zappos in a blog post and I won’t be the last – Zappos has won millions of people over and that’s what builds their brand. Not fancy ads, not an amazing agency who created a great social marketing campaign – their service wins customers for life who are willing to pay a few dollars more, skip the offers other retailers provide and tell everyone. Zappos is one of the strongest social brands and it’s because of their value offering.