The recent customer care controversy on Twitter has been a nightmare for Airtel. The company has been facing a backlash across mediums, after a customer asked them to transfer her complaint to a customer care executive of a different religion. The company, allegedly complied, as the next tweet from the company's customer care handle, was signed off by a different executive. Airtel has issued a clarification defending its executives and said that the allegations are untrue and factually incorrect.
However, this is not the first time a company has been called out on social media for mishandling a complaint or has landed into a controversy due to it. At times, a simple oversight has landed brands into big trouble. Case in point is British Airway-Sachin Tendulkar controversy of 2015, when the company in a standard reply to cricketer's query, asked him his address and full name, which riled his fans on the platform.
A fact to be taken into account is that brands dodge these potential PR nightmares almost every day. While banking sector was the first to use social media for customer service, today most consumer-facing sectors such as travel and hospitality, e-commerce, telecom, food and beverage, FMCG etc. use social media for redressal of consumer complaints.
The handles of popular hospitality brands, get 50-150 queries in a day and for a telecom brand the number could be in thousands. To deal with such humungous amount of queries on the go is not easy for companies and therefore many brands outsource their customer care services. For instance, in the telecom sector besides Reliance Jio most companies outsource their customer care. In fact, many companies and digital marketing firms, have established command centres to resolve customer queries.
These command centres have tools which gives them information in real-time to help solve a customer's problem. While tool such as are Radian 6, Hootsuite, Adobe Social and Socialbakers, Koonect Insights help them in social media management, social listening and social media monitoring; others such as Klout, Simplify360 help them in customer care management. Klout, for instance, helps social media executives measure a person's score on social media, depending on his followers, activity etc. and thus gives them an idea of the response which is needed.
But, according to Nimesh Shah, head maven at digital agency Windchimes Communications, besides tools manual presence is important. "We definitely need tools. Tools help you aggregate, they help you carry out a basic level of analysis etc. but there is a need for manual intervention," he says.
Windchimes handles customer care for brands in travel and hospitality, BFSI, F&B sectors. According to the company, for each brand they receive 50-150 queries in a day.
Shah informs that they have a very clearly defined standard operating procedures (SOP) in place for certain complaints which are very repetitive in nature. As for legitimate queries, which they are not able to solve, they ask the concerned brand's help in solving them. But the real problem lies in identifying the illegitimate queries and dealing with them.
Premkumar Iyer, Director, Digital Command Centre, Gozoop, says that every day about 3-4 per cent of queries they get are illegitimate. Gozoop handles customer care for 10 brands and has two command centres in place. "At times, people don't even want a resolution, they just want to malign a brand online. In many cases people just want to vent out," Iyer says.
However, the real test of their patience happens when a customer gets abusive.
"There have been cases where a customer has told us: I am coming down and burning your office if you don't give my money by night. We have been asked: Are you guys suffering from down syndrome?," Iyer says.
How do customer care executives deal with such incidents?
The SOP here, Shah says, is to investigate. They check the profile of the person on social media sites and see if they have are in habit of raising similar queries.
"We check the profile, we want to understand this is not a bot, it is not one of those fake profiles. Somebody who genuinely has a complaint will detail it out extensively. There is a lot detailing here and the moment that is missing you know something is not right," Shah explains.
Gozoop, on the other hand, asks these customer of their phone number, membership id etc. to ascertain it is a genuine complainant. In most cases, when the query is illegitimate they don't get a response.
"We keep on putting out this message so that people know that the brand wants to help but the person is trying to be troublesome," he says.
For trolls both these agencies have similar SOP. They ignore them.
Time is of the essence in most of these situations, as delay in the reply can make an already disgruntled customer furious. To address this many companies have automated their customer care response. But, according to Shah, this is not an ideal solution, as the customer is looking for a solution and not just a reply. And hence despite of the hundreds of queries they get every day, most companies use their manual resources for resolution than bots.