Tearing down the Walls to Good Customer Service

Call me a princess, but I had to return or exchange a bunch of damaged or bad quality things in the past two weeks.  From a third try at getting my eyeglass prescription filled correctly to a keratin treatment re-do to a mattress that smelled like mildew (eeww!).  The good news is that all three of those companies redid or replaced the items without much hassle and with decent customer service.  (Thank you, Loft 26, Cohens, and Sleepys!) 

The bad news is that I'm nostalgic for a time when workmanship was excellent and important to begin with.  (Of course, I only HEAR about those times from older relatives or movies on Turner Classics.)

Back to the good news.  Customer service.  We're in a time when consumer goods are a dime a dozen and Miss Manners is rolling over in her grave.  We just don't seem to care as much.  BUT, now with more people out of work, companies can be more discriminating in the workers they hire, and bad employee attitudes may put bad workers at bay.

Danny Meyer, whom I've long respected for his conscientiousness about sustainability as well as creating quality restaurants from Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe to the hot new Shake Shake phenomenon , just added a brand extension to Union Square Hospitality Group all about customer service.  Today on the Wall Street Journal Report he explained how his new HQ -- for Hospitality Quotient -- is new company to help those who are already the best at what they do or make, make their stakeholders even happier with good treatment and good customer service.

In a way, we can also thank social media for influencing this potential trend:  Let's look at what Frank Eliason set out to do with @comcastcares on Twitter.  Knowing people can say and write exactly what they want about a company he and others, like the classic examples of Zappos and Dell, helped inspire them to make good customer service a mandate on the social web. It's all tied together.  The walls are down, companies are bare naked, and even Cohen's Opticals knows I can write something good or bad so maybe, just maybe, companies are erring on the side of better workmanship, better customer-facing employee training and better HQ overall.  And better customer service can actually help stimulate the economy!  I like this post on it from last year: http://www.goodexperience.com/2009/04/on-hospitality-in-a-t.php

Now, there are still the places like Bard Graduate Center, which has ignored my pleas and emails to begin their construction on Saturday mornings later than the 7A start they have had in place for the past weeks.  So, I can take it to my blog, and at least feel I had a place to share my pain...and hope they will remember that the walls between public opinion and good customer service are as thin as the walls between our physical buildings.
ARGH!!

You Might be a SM S-head If... (SM Swelled Head)

The whole strategy of tapping social media for business marketing is to listen to what the world is saying about you or your company. Then, by being smart, or funny, or a good resource when you participate in online conversations, earning a good reputation. Just like the popular kid in school. I hate to say it's like the George Burns quote, but it IS sort of like what he said about acting:

"it's all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

You work on creating a well rounded perception of your brand, your brilliant thought leadership, your trustworthiness, etc. and you hope you get people to talk TO you and ABOUT you (hopefully in a good way!) -- drive digital word of mouth.

All that is great and helps add some soul to a CEO or more lifeblood to a business. We've seen the success stories of the Zappos customer service, Dell's course correction, and Obama central become over-Tweeted parables of bar-raising expectations.

Where I start to get concerned, and believe me I'm no exception, is when we start confusing our personal value and when we're always thinking or promoting our value as a "brand." We start to measure our own worth by the number of followers, friends and alerts, and turn what should be our more personal dialogues into crafted multilogues.

When did even my personal pages or Tweets become a race to be the first to post the cool link? I mean, heaven-forbid you DON'T include some valuable nugget these days?? Who needs that kind of pressure on, say, Facebook? Can't I just hang out by a wall?

But the world is a great big sheet of cellophane now, so poster beware. (And yes, I WILL stop taking your feeds if you think I am titillated about your lunch choice today.) It's a fine line between being more professional in our personal life online, and starting to drink your own Kool-Aid, believing tons of people are really listening as we try to come across more personally in our professional life.


It's easy to confuse hitting the first few hundred or the thousand mark on Twitter (@mossappeal, ya'all) with real people who will hang on your every word at an actual cocktail party. I've heard lots of stories of groups with hundreds of fans on LinkedIn or friends on FaceBook using it exclusively to post an invite to an event...only to have lots of leftover pigs in a blanket because of no-shows.

It takes time and it also takes a little humility to promote yourself on every platform and remember to find that balance between your personal and professional brand.

So I offer these Warning Signs.

You might be an S-Head on Social Media (Swelled Head, that is) IF:

1. You think you can stop Dating and start D@ing. Worse, you try to set up a first date via a D@.
2. You think your friends want to know your opinion on the state of crude and your followers want to know a crude joke, and you blast all the same feeds to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn .
3. You try to get a reservation at a hot restaurant by assuming they, too, think 1000 followers makes you A-list.
4. You're incensed when no one Diggs you, man.
5. You truly believe your last 23 Q&A answers deserved "Best Expert" status.
6. You are stunned that Mrs. Kutcher isn't following you.

...And the 7th sign you may have a SM S-head?
Your blogs are way too long because you enjoy expounding and are sure that since there are a billion people online now, at least a million will hang on your every word. ...whoops.

And by the way, I hope you tweet this blog or link it to your profile, because I'm -- I mean, it -- is really smart and funny and resourceful, don't you think?