The Final Tweet

What happens next? Photograph by modomatic.

Use Twitter to contact customer service? I shouldn’t have to do it. That’s because any well-organized customer service operation should pay equal attention to all customer service channels, regardless of whether it’s phone, email, Facebook, IM or Twitter.

But I needed a way to contact Innoveer’s 401(k)—U.S. pension plan—provider after our account manager had “gone rogue,” impeding our attempts to switch to a different provider.

After trying and failing to make contact with someone in authority at the firm via email and phone, that left only one option: I had to tweet.

Pay Now or Pay Later

Given the beating to its reputation that the financial services industry has taken in the wake of the bailout, followed by the billions of dollars that firms paid themselves in bonuses, you’d think that the company in question—not a mom-and-pop shop but one of the country’s largest financial services firms—would proactively address customer service.

Indeed, the smart money is that it costs far less to keep the customer you have, versus finding a new one. One important technique for keeping customers is to keep them satisfied, by ensuring that you diagnose and resolve any issues before they become problems. Unfortunately, we found that the firm in question appeared to be taking the opposite approach.

How to Fail at Customer Service

Let’s start at the top: We had a horrible account manager. He was unpleasant to work with and didn’t treat us well. Eventually, we felt that his firm wasn’t offering the right product for our needs and decided to switch to a different provider. But when our vice president of human resources called our account manager at the firm to initiate the switchover, he was completely unhelpful—at one point, calling her “babe,” not providing information that he’s legally obliged to share, and refusing to divulge his boss’s name.

One golden rule of selling is that if there’s a problem, make sure you’re talking to someone’s boss. But my requesting that information in an email to customer service didn’t produce a response. Furthermore, when I called customer service with the same question, I got lost in a phone tree which seemed designed to ensure that callers couldn’t talk to a live service agent.

Finally, I tweeted the firm with the account manager’s name and location and asked:

@[Firm] we’re getting horrible service from [account manager], he won’t tell us his boss’ name, can you?

Lo and behold, the vice president who runs that operation quickly reached out. My head of HR likewise received a very conciliatory voicemail from our soon-to-be-history account manager.

Issues with Issue Resolution

Where all did the company fall down? Based on Innoveer’s extensive customer service experience, we’ve found that if you want to excel at customer service, you must master these five best practices:

• Services leadership: Managing service excellence
• Customer entitlement: Delivering service against agreement levels
• Issue resolution: Keeping customers by solving problems
• Experience management: Driving customer satisfaction through service quality
• Quality measurement: Knowing if your approach is destined for success

For the firm in question, cue deficiencies especially with issue resolution—namely, keeping customers by solving problems. To resolve issues, you must provide customers with an escalation mechanism, and also be proactive so that you can diagnose and fix problems before customers get fed up and go elsewhere.

Did our former 401(k) provider have any sort of process in place for proactively connecting with us to ensure that we were satisfied customers? Not that we saw. Was there an escalation mechanism? Again, no. I had to email, phone and then resort to using Twitter to get a response.

In contrast, even the manufacturer of my inexpensive microwave oven used an “escalation team” to rapidly resolve my recent under-warranty replacement request.

Perhaps the financial services firm in question decided that it was cheaper to not measure service quality, be proactive, or ensure high levels of customer satisfaction. Except that the less expensive approach is really to not lose your customers or risk damaging your reputation because of easily remedied problems.

Learn More

Want to master customer service? Don’t start with Twitter or Facebook. Instead, begin by benchmarking your customer service operation to understand what to improve next.

For more on the art of keeping and managing customers—regardless of the customer service channel—and paying proper attention to all parts of the “customer lifecycle,” see our Q&A with Monster.com. Meanwhile, our consumer manufacturing-focused white paper about how to make the customer king details more customer management essentials.