How @KLM and @Telstra Manage Expectation to Guarantee Customer Satisfaction on Twitter

Companies everywhere are obsessed with feedback. We are inundated with feedback requests, satisfaction surveys, ratings and reviews predominately sent via email, text and the web. Feedback is so valuable, brands are willing to pay for it. It’s big business and it means a lot to companies who are striving to make better decisions about their businesses, acquire new customers and retain loyal, satisfied customers.

But are brands really doing all they can to improve their chances of customer satisfaction over social?

I believe that brands are missing out on a key ingredient and that ingredient is transparency.

For brands to really improve their customer satisfaction they need to adopt a more open approach on how they are performing across the social channels they are engaging on.

I’d like to see more brands on social keeping their customers informed. As we move closer and closer to becoming an ‘always on’ society, keeping customers up to date on response times, first contact and resolution rates can lead to more engaged and ultimately better informed customers.

We see it being deployed across the call center. When you dial that toll free customer care line, you'll no doubt be informed of where you are in the queue and what the waiting time is. Social is indeed faster and more responsive than the call center. It’s why customers have moved towards more open, accessible platforms like Twitter to raise complaints and queries, but as platforms like Twitter become more popular for customer service, the need to manage expectation can be critical to ensuring customers are informed of how long its going to take to respond to them.

Facebook have acknowledged this on their Business pages, with a feature that states how long a company typically replies within. It’s there because it manages the customers expectations and encourages interaction.

We recently found that from over 200+ social customer care accounts on www.helphandles.com there are only a few brands who are publicly promoting their response times on their Twitter profile.

KLM have taken an innovative approach by displaying their expected response time directly in their profile header and have automated this to update every 5 mins.

Telstra have taken a similar but more conservative approach and have just added it to their profile description. We are unsure if this is regularly updated and accurate though.

We believe that the path to customer satisfaction starts with expectation.

If a customer is researching a product or service and can get information on that companies response times, listen into the type of conversations other customers are having with that brand, and even find out when the best time to Tweet would be, (all of which is available on Help Handles), it can certainly drive and influence a customers decision making.

By setting out what is realistically achievable, and managing customers expectations brands can measure how they have done against that expectation and pretty much guarantee the customer is satisfied.

It doesn't mean that you have to be the fastest or the most responsive. It could be that on average your response time on Twitter is over an hour. If the customer knows that information before they ask a question, they are more likely to be reasonable when you do reply to them. If you reply within the hour, you’ll guarantee at the very least you’ll have over delivered and exceeded the customers expectation.

Transparent social customer service is something we are committed to promoting at Help Handles

We encourage brands to benchmark their performance against the competition and improve their social customer support, satisfaction and reputation through publicly accessible metrics, ratings and reviews.

We believe it’s good for customers, it’s good for brands and it’s good for social customer service in general.

Follow me on my journey towards transparent social customer service with Help Handles. Subscribe to my mailing list to receive free premium access to Help Handles and i’ll also let you know when I’ve got something to share with you.

Click here to get started.