I’ve been there before myself, several times. Between acquisitions, periods of rapid growth, outsourcing of departments and a myriad of other challenges, we saw social support as the way to quickly address a bad stigma about the brand’s service, long queue times and public critique over support. But while social support provided an apparent short term fix, the truth was we were making a long term mistake and conditioning our customers to turn to the wrong venue, a very public venue, to solve something which they asked us to, and we should have been able to, solve elsewhere.

When social support is “better”, that obviously means everything else is worse

Connected as consumers are, not everyone starts with twitter or Facebook and just as you don’t want to force a customer to pick email over the phone or the phone over an in store rep, forcing a customer to use a social channel, whether it’s directed or just the only place they find an answer in a timely manner, starts the whole conversation off on a negative foot.

At the same time you can bet that by the time they show up on your social support channel, they’ve already ranted about you… They’re coming in hot and the solution is no longer to give them a great experience, it’s to make up for a bad one.

Tainted, an engagement channel becomes a support stop

Every reply is an @ that shows up when someone loads your twitter account. Every Facebook, Blog or Foursquare comment remains front and center for the world to see hundreds, thousands of times in a single day. When you have a branded channel taking a barrage of help questions, when team leads or executives are becoming primary contact points, you’ve got a major miss that dilutes your ability to use social to engage, promote and build with your customers.

Customer service is marketing these days and a failure to any one offering leads to rants, complaints and a very public problem that is easily avoided by taking the same investment approach you’ve put into social support and spreading the ‘love’ around.

An offline customer is just as potent as an online

Often social support programs deliver higher service and better “gives” as company perceive that the visibility warrants a serious fix. While customers sure appreciate the extra gives, it’s a mistake to think that the most potent voice is the one coming to twitter. After all, what story is really going to get passed around… The airport customer bounced around by the front desk and phone support while stranded at the airport or the guy tweeting. Anyone has the potential to take a negative viral and everyone shares bad experiences. Channel is not the qualifier.

Adding to this, customers are increasingly connected so if you let a policy, or five, slip on Facebook posts, you can bet people will circumvent other channels and go right to you there… Good for your stats, bad for the business (or a potential flag that those policies need to evolve quick). Don’t be gamed.

Build great support with a social option

That’s not to say you shouldn’t use social for support — social can be a great support system but it has to be a preference channel and a part of a larger, working system where the customer can have a good experience via phone, email or in store as well. and it has to be done right as an opportunity for those who chose to use it.

Ideas like individual support reps help avoid flooding your channels with support mentions; peer to peer communities allow for scale while bringing credibility to concerns over product or quality; multi channel support crm makes a continuous, and highly personal experience but most of all, the customer expects the same great response in any other channel.

Of course anyone working in ecommerce, or any corporation, could have told you there would be problems. Tens of millions of flower orders , dozens of companies, and just 18 or so hours  to get them all there on time (but not too early), it’s only logical that some orders would fail within the process… Some complaints were inevitable.

And some level of complaints are inevitable for almost all b2c companies. No matter how perfect the process is, something will fail at some point and whether it’s the fault of the company or something entirely out of their hands, like the weather, it’s all going to come back on them, and these days back to social media. So knowing that something bad will happen, it’s up to us as marketers/ social strategists to insure that when problems come up we have the right plans to respond, but also that they don’t dominate the conversation or become the purpose of our page. We need to be more than just support channels .

Going back to my Teleflora example (and to be clear and not just pick out one company, the same issue is happening with ProFlowers and others that I checked), something is missing – balance. On the pages of most flower brands I visited just about everything was negative and support related. If these companies had happy customers (and I know they do because I am one) they were nowhere to be found and likely for good reason, no one had asked them to join up and share.

My suggestion to flower business earlier in the week was to provide an insert with orders for people to evangelize their great orders (or their bad ones, a review is what it is). All it takes is a simple note to remind people to comment, to tell them where you are, and out of the millions, thousands or even of just hundreds of customers you touch, you’ll get some balance… You’ll get light advocates.

Take this a step further, build a social program that encourages fan participation before the issue and you’ll be far more prepared when one does strike. This is where best practices really kick in – buying fans in masse with discounts, coupons and giveaways is easy and gets numbers, but successfully cultivating them takes a great deal more than good offers, it takes useful content, engaging directly around posts other than support, even how the business goes to market, the policies and programs that you have and how your fans react to them. But if you can build a dialogue and a regular flow (and yes, this is possible for even seemingly mundane brands) then you have moderate advocates on and around to help when there are negatives, to explain that there is a good to the bad, and to be talking about things other than support and trouble. And of course if you really go all the way, develop that full advocacy program and engage customers to become brand evangelists, community leaders, and the like, well now you have a whole force of people to balance and even better, aid.

Now don’t get me wrong, the issue customers are having with their flower orders are certainly very real and need a response, not to be buried or hidden by a flood of off topic discussions. Transparency is good, real responses are what matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have both – it is again a balance of what your social media channels do for you and your customers.

As for the support side, we all know it isn’t easy, or cheap, but it is something which companies tend to get… and here, the flower companies are doing a good job of responding 1:1, giving direct email addresses, and all of the other support processes you’d hope for when customers are upset and support lines are backed up with callers… they may not be perfect but they’re on it for this part. But while the support side is going well, when all people see is bad, they get more upset, the assume nothing is going right, and they lose the benefit of peer to peer support or comments to turn too.

And that’s why you need your fans to know, connect and be involved with your social media presence now, when things are good. Social media is not just about offers and sales generation, not just a support system, but when used right, it can be a dialogue platform to get insights, have the right discussions that curtail or stop issues early on, and yes, be a place where people share all the great things your product / service / brand are doing that may them advocates and repeat customers.

When companies go away from their channels two important things happen – first the questions stack up which is an annoying experience for the customer who is waiting and the employee who must wade through tweets all of Monday but more importantly an opportunity is lost.

Think about it for a second – a few years ago your web traffic was probably minimal on the weekend and big during the week. Weekdays may still be bigger than weekends but it’s a digital world and people are online all days of the week, from the office, from the home, even the mall on their cell phone.
Think about it some more – issues happen 24×7 and in a connected world no one waits to hear back on Monday. By the time you respond to provide the insight your customer needs, they already bought or that new nasty video with an incorrect fact is already out there.

The solution is of course an unpleasant one for anyone reading this but it is reality. You need to be on more than from the office. Whether it’s a customer service rep taking an hourly glance at automated reports or your staff actually getting into the weeds the biggest gains happen when no one expects it. Respond at 9pm on a Sunday and you’ll wow a few power users. Get product announcement clarified and you’ll avoid the confusion from that one blog. It’s not like you aren’t already on checking your own accounts anyways…