Two weeks ago I wrote about how I had felt slighted by a company through social media. If you missed the blog post, you can read it here. Long story short, I had tweeted a company, only to find that my question was swept under the rug and that the company was replying to other people instead of helping me take care of my issue.
If you’re a big company with a huge follower base, keeping up with Twitter can admittedly be tricky; Twitter is a real-time feed, so if people are actively interacting and tweeting with your company, it can be difficult to keep up with the dozens, hundreds or even thousands of tweets that filter through to you. Some messages might fall through cracks, or a company just might have been too busy with other tweets to notice yours. These things can happen, but if you have already committed to being on social media, you need to make sure that you live up to the cardinal rules of being on social media—that is, you need to be diligent about responding to everyone, every inquiry, no matter how positive or negative the issue is.
In response to my blog post, the company-in-question, Birchbox, graciously sent me an email apologizing for what had happened. Part of the email reads:
“I’m so sorry for the unresponsiveness of my team to your previous Twitter correspondence. Our policy is to respond to all customer inquiries, good or bad, in a timely manner. We value Twitter as a customer service channel, especially due to the real time information it provides about customer sentiment…it has stressed the urgency of us reevaluating how best to handle customer service through social media. For example, we are considering adding a customer service specific Twitter handle so that we can avoid tweets like yours falling through the cracks.”
Hiring someone just handle just a customer-service specific Twitter account is a great idea , but what I was impressed with the most from this email was how Birchbox had taken the time and thought to a. read my blog and b. consider the points I made in my post because they genuinely wanted to find a solution to prevent something like this from happening again.
Birchbox handled the situation professionally and gracefully. I greatly appreciated how they have embraced social media to help them better serve their customers. My loyalty has been restored in Birchbox, and I wish them the best of luck with their upcoming social media endeavors.
