Your customer is part of your social media community (whether you like it or not).

In the example above, all Pizza Hut had to do was acknowledge the causal factor (the iPhone app sucks, and nobody seems to care), and solve the main issue (Doug wants a pizza). That obvious fail aside, here’s the other thing that Pizza Hut failed to recognize: Doug Karr is a social media influencer and a major pizza enthusiast. Oops.

Doug has 31,000 Twitter followers and runs Marketing Tech Blog. He gives talks around the country as to how to use social media for marketing purposes, and as such he also gives examples of What Not to Do. This particular example is now in a presentation he gives about customer service on social media, and that’s how I ran across it. (Doug and I co-presented a social listening webinar on social media monitoring across the business organization, incidentally, and this example is in it.)

Social media community management is something that you need to do if you maintain a social media presence, whether or not you’re planning on an active social media community marketing program. Your customers are plugged in and online, and they are going to use the channels available to them to get your attention. With that in mind, this example illustrates a few key points that you want to consider when using your media channels for social community management:

1) Don’t pass the buck.

Whether or not you’re in the department that will actually fix the issue being reported is irrelevant. If you’re a human person and can address the issue being presented to you by a customer on the channel you manage, it’s your job to make an effort to address the issue.

2) Have a process in place to manage customer service requests.

People will use your social channels for customer service issues. You as a brand need to have a method to receive those messages, respond to them promptly, and route them accordingly. Some customer service software (Zendesk being one) now have functionalities that allow you to create a ticket from a tweet, but it’s really not that hard to do it the old fashioned way. Hopefully, there is a human running your social media account, and that human should understand both how to respond to a customer and how to make sure that the issue gets relayed to the appropriate person.

3) Use a good social media community management tool to identify influencers before you leave them annoyed and hungry.

Any good social media marketing tool will have community management features that give you the basic profiles and stats on a person who has engaged with your brand. If Pizza Hut’s social media marketer had been using that tool, those stats would have been front and center.

4) 1:1 customer engagement is an opportunity. Use it wisely.

When a person is taking the time to engage with you, this is an awesome opportunity to make a great impression and create an actual brand advocate. Awesome impressions are what spur good social media community cultivation. Making your customer feel heard is important; solving the issue is a chance to turn that person around and into an ardent fan. Excellent customer service is one of the easiest, best ways to get people tweeting about you in a positive way, and illustrates a brand promise that you actually care about your customers.

5) You’re human. Act like it.

If someone asked you for directions on the street, would you tell them to pull out their iPhone and use Google Maps? (If the answer is “yes,” you should definitely consider a career that doesn’t interface directly with customers.) I’m going to give us humans the benefit of the doubt here, and assume that people are generally nice and overall want to help each other out with the easy stuff. If you’re having trouble distinguishing where you should go above and beyond to help someone, just pretend that the person is your Mom. Would you tell your Mom to fill out a customer service form? I hope not. (And if your answer is “yes,” that’s the wrong answer. Trust me. Ask your mother.)

Good social community management happens when we act like people. The good news is that, as people, we have an instinctive understanding of community. In this particular example, just having some empathy for how someone feels when he’s hungry and hampered by a technology issue that’s keeping him hungry should have been enough for that anonymous Pizza Hut employee to take the happy path to customer satisfaction by making sure that Doug got his pizza.

AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?

The end of this dramatic story of an absentee pizza ends happily for Doug: Doug really did order from Papa John’s. And he ate that pizza. And since then, he’s ordered more Papa John’s pizzas than he would have otherwise. As for Pizza Hut, their iPhone app reviews would indicate that they still have some issues to work out, but it does now have 4 stars instead of the 1 star it had at the time. Hope for everyone!