The need for ‘honest listening’

National Complaints Day: The need for ‘honest listening’, re-inventing corporations and Club Penguin…

Today, apart from being Friday 13th, is also National Complaints Day. Research conducted by ComplaintCommunity suggests that over the course of today more than one and a half million complaints will be lodged across the UK.

Against this backdrop, I was fortunate enough to bring together a variety of people from the public sector, retail, financial services, customer experience and social media monitoring to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically, and customer service more generally.

What was interesting from the discussion, was that whether you were a large enterprise living social media, through to one yet to take your first tentative step, the journey was clearly more about mindset than toolset. There was also a need for organisations to understand that the rules of engagement were changing, and with it a different type of lexicon was being defined. Customers were now shaping the service they wanted, and whether companies liked it or not, the bottom line was: get used to it!

Echoes of one of the theses from The Cluetrain Manifesto, written some 11 years ago, still ring true today: “If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!”

Some of the other common themes that ran through the conversation were:

• ROI – return and investment doesn’t have to be financial
• At what point does a company engage with its customers?
• How do you identify where your customers are?
• How do you define ‘complaint’? Negative sentiment, direct issue or poor experience
• How best to establish internal procedures?
• Social media becomes engagement media
• How do you manage customers’ expectations?
• Identifying ways to best ‘handle’ customer complaints? Who is responsible? 
• Localisation of social media for online customer service

It became evident as the discussion progressed that what we were all really talking about, in the words of Rob Skinner (Head of PR, PayPal UK) was the ‘re-invention of the corporation’, with perhaps social media and smartphones, the catalysts of this business change.

I was nervous going into this roundtable with the calibre of people sitting round me, and the thought of ‘what happens if no one says anything?’. But by the end of the discussion it was absolutely ‘affirming’, not only at the level of discussion that took place, the breadth of topics covered, the openness with which BT, PayPal and the Ministry of Justice shared their insights, experiences and concerns, that this thing we white-label ‘social media’ is here to stay, signals a change for the good, and requires an honesty in approach that customers not only deserve, but are finally experiencing as well.

So to those who took part, I thank you, and to those who are yet to start your journey, I encourage you to do so now. If your children are already ‘doing social’ now via sites such as Club Penguin isn’t that a telling insight into their future and the future of your business?

For a summary of the discussion on the impact of social media on complaints please click here

If you would like to be notified when the audio and video are available from this event, or for more information about the the impact of social media on complaints or customer service, please feel free to contact Guy Stephens by email or on 0845 054 6545.