Monday, February 17, 2020

Social media platforms the most effective tool for escalation management


Brand’s reputation plays a vital role in attracting more customers to itself and reaffirming people’s faith in them in the long run. It plays more important role in service industry which is fragile and easily targeted by people for their service offerings. With advent of large number of e commerce firm’s things have become more complicated now. That’s the reason organizations have started giving more importance to escalation management.

Today most organizations have internal escalation management team to address the concern of their customer efficiently in a short span of time. Organizations try their level best to resolve issues offline so that customers don’t vent their anger online at social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Reason is the large scale visibility of these platforms and its harmful effect on brand value.

Based on my person experience I can say that Twitter is the best platform for quicker resolution of concern and I would like to substantiate my stance by the most recent incident countered by me.

I ordered an item from an e commerce firm on 5th February 2020 with the probable delivery date as 8th February 2020. On 8th Feb, I missed delivery guy’s call and when I called him back after 5 mins, he didn’t respond to my call. I tried to call him 2 -3 times, since he was not responding I decided to wait for his call back.

He is didn’t call me back but I was astonished by an SMS which stated, that the item has been delivered to me and it was collected by me personally. I was furious at the receipt of this SMS as the item was prepaid, I immediately called the customer care to apprise them of the situation and they requested me to wait for some time.

After 24 hrs I called customer care again to check the status of my complain, this time too they requested for more time for resolving the issue. Hence I decided to approach the appellate authority for quicker resolution of issue, here also they requested for more time without divulging exact time frame.

Since there was no response from appellate authority even after 48 hrs, I approached them again, this time too they tried to appease me with same old punch line “give us more time”. I was literally drained out by now, hence I decided to vent my anger on Twitter and the response was amazing.

5 minutes after posting my concern on Twitter, I was asked to DM (direct message) my concern to them on Twitter along with my number which I did promptly. I post my concern on Twitter  by 11 am and by 3 pm I received call from the delivery guy inquiring about my package and address one more time, he apologized for this conduct with an assurance that my package will be delivered to me by 7 pm.

At 7 pm delivery guy called me once again to inform me that he was on his way to deliver my package, in another 5 mins, he was at my palace and handed over the package to me personally this time and apologized for the entire fiasco.

I wondered if I had posted my concern on Twitter initially only, this issue would have been solved on 8th February 2020 itself. This is not the first time that Twitter has been instrumental in resolving an issue, I have seen similar response in past too and the same has been resonated to me by my friends as well.

So my question is “Why do we need offline platform when online channels are more effective in resolving customer’s woes?”