Friday, May 23, 2008

The Dark Side of Customer Service 2.0

The fast and furious growth of social media has started to change expectations of customers online and radically altered how we expect companies to interact with us in virtual space.

Yesterday, the Twittersphere was awash in debate over the nascent mobile social network's terms of service (TOS).

Ariel Waldman, a popular user, said she'd been receiving harassing tweets -- 140 character messages sent out in a public forum -- and asked Twitter customer service to ban the user. The company's response: the messages didn't constitute harassment so they coudn't ban the user.

The debate over the TOS raged on Twitter and at Get Satisfaction, a third-party site where customers and companies can air grievances about poor service.

The end result: Twitter took a lot of heat, but the company engaged in the conversation and defused some of the bad blood bubbling because of its refusal to ban the user. What did come out of it, though, was recognition on Twitter's part that it needs to shore up its TOC to be more reflective of the community.

And that's something that all companies must deal with because social media allows for an unfettered debate, which sometimes turns ugly as it did with in St. Louis when a woman posted a negative review about a restaurant on Yelp only to have the owner start harassing her with phone calls and emails, threatening her if she didn't change the review.

In a Web 2.0 world, we expect instant communication and rapid problem solving.

Posted By Brad at 09:08 AM
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