Power in Social Media

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a couple of different customer service experiences that I had that reminded me about what our customers (students, teachers, principals) should expect and deserve from us as EdTechs.

I want to follow up on that just a little to share another lesson learned from that experience. In the second example I talked about a company that I thought was not giving me unsatisfactory customer service. I worked with customer service representatives for two days and felt their solutions were not in my best interests. I ended up telling them that I would send back the product and they could just refund my money including shipping costs I had paid. After 12 hours I still had no response to even that request.

At this point I had enough dealing with them in that way. So I took to social media to express my frustrations. I sent out a simple tweet including the company's twitter handle. It expressed my frustrations and that I would no longer be giving them my business or recommending them to others.

Within 5 minutes the person manning the twitter account of the company reached out to me and asked what was wrong. Within another 10 minutes she had resolved my issue in an extremely satisfactory way. It completely turned me around on the company again.

Now the more cynical may say, well it was a case of the squeaky wheel getting greased. Perhaps it was. But the social media person at least reached out to me quickly and acted decisively on behalf of her company. Sure they don't want that kind of negative publicity out there for others to see, but they really could have soothed me with about half of what they did. This person went the extra mile to make sure that I returned to the fold, so to speak.

Now the moral of the story might seem to be that if you want to reach a company for customer satisfaction hit them in their social media account first. I really reached out in that forum mainly to let others know that I felt their treatment of me as a customer at that point was so lacking that I was willing to withhold any further business from them. However, because of their social media presence they were able to turn the situation completely around.

They went from letting me tell their story in a negative way, to getting them to tell it in a positive way. That is what it should be like for our schools, use the power of social media to tell our own stories and get others to tell them in a positive light because of the service we can provide to our customers.