You Can Absolutely Ignore Social Customer Care

Is social customer care important to you?

Recently, customer service king o’kings Shep Hyken, visited Social Media Marketing World in San Diego to speak on the customer experience and its changing nature. His experience at the conference inspired him to write this article for 4hoteliers: Social Customer Care Cannot Be Ignored 

I have to disagree with Shep. I’m not trying to be contrarian (even if I do love that word), but you, as a business of any size, can absolutely, positively ignore social media as a tool for customer service. You’re a grown ass human. You can do whatever you want, however you want.

Here are some of your choices to make it easier:

Make sure you have no social media accounts at all. None. – Just because social media activity continues to grow, and platforms such as Twitter are increasingly being transformed into customer service channels, doesn’t mean you have to join them. If your customer is getting mad being on hold forever or irked with their inability to find anything on your website, being unable to locate your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account will only add to their frustration “fun”. Really, you don’t have to be on social, even though your customers are.

Become blissfully unaware of any conversations or mentions of your company. – Your customers are talking about you. They are talking about your industry, your competition, your opportunities missed and successes achieved. Why would you want to know any of that? It’s just more work to collect, share and analyze that data, much less do anything with it. And what if you hear your customer service or marketing is WAY off base? That’s a lot of effort to change course. Why would you want to do that?

Make sure any comments you do come across, are absolutely ignored. – There it is. A comment. Positive or negative, it’s there. Why is it necessary for them to get a response, a thank you or an answer? They’ve said their peace, probably best to leave it alone or there might be more to respond to.

If you do feel the urge to respond, take your time. Take as looooong as you want. – You’re busy. You’re juggling so many other balls, you shouldn’t need to hurry with a response. I’m sure your customers aren’t interested in an answer or acknowledgement anytime soon. And the longer you take to get back to them, the more understanding they’ll be. Really.

Keep your responses as “cookie-cutter” and generic as possible. – Save yourself time and effort by responding to all your customers on social media with the same response. Cut and paste. Almost robotic really. The least amount of personalization and human touch possible will only help speed things along. Why relationship build when there will always be another customer.

Wait for them to come to come to you. – There’s no need to be proactive. If your customers want to talk to you, they’ll find you. Let them make the effort. You’re here (kinda) if they want to talk.

Or…you can absolutely do the opposite of this and better serve your customers on social media by being:

• accessible
• timely
• customer-centric
• empathic
• personal
• proactive

It’s up to you.

(Ok, so maybe I don’t disagree with Shep so much.)