![\"spicejet](\"http:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/spicejet.png\" "\\"spicejet-200w\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nI was flying back from Hyderabad to Pune (for the uninitiated, these are two Indian cities located 800 kms apart). My flight was delayed. Just before boarding the aircraft, I found out the real reason for the delay (check out my post\u00a0Games Airlines Play<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>to know what really happened). Since the truth differed drastically from the airline\u2019s official version announced over the airport\u2019s PA system, I was quite ticked off. Just before powering off my mobile phone in preparation for takeoff, I sent off a quick tweet expressing my displeasure at the airline\u2019s misleading communications. As I was collecting my baggage at Pune airport one and a half hours later, I received a call from the airline following up on my tweet. Its representative told me that there was a genuine internal confusion about the cause of the delay and assured me that the airline didn\u2019t have any intention to mislead its passengers. Over the next two days, the airline communicated with me via Twitter and email \u2013 when 140 characters didn\u2019t suffice \u2013 and cleared the confusion.<\/p>\n After this experience, I was convinced about the power of social media driven customer service and decided to turn to Twitter \/ Facebook whenever I needed to get something done with any of my service providers \u2013 at least those who do have a social media presence and take it seriously.<\/p>\n A couple of months ago,\u00a0I had an issue with a certain bank and needed to contact its customer service. Normally, I\u2019d have had to log on to its Internet Banking portal, visit the Contact Us page, click on two or three drop down menus to select the nature of my query \/ request \/ complaint (QRC). Often, I wouldn\u2019t have found anything fitting my situation and would\u2019ve been forced to contort my brain cells heavily enough before I was eventually able to select one of the available alternatives. With my new found faith in social media powered service, I decided to ditch Internet Banking altogether. I simply posted my question on the bank\u2019s Facebook Wall. In the time it\u2019d have taken me to log a ticket on the bank\u2019s website had I chosen that channel, I actually got a reply to my FB post (see my post\u00a0Pushing The Envelope On Adopting Cutting Edge Technology \u2013 Part 2<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0for the full FB newsfeed) and the matter was closed. This was an\u00a0exhilarating\u00a0experience, unparalleled by web, telephone or any other channel with the possible exception of branch.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve subsequently reached out to many other companies \u2013 in high-tech, insurance and telecommunications industries \u2013 via Twitter and Facebook and my experience has been uniformly positive.<\/p>\n Therefore, I\u2019m convinced that social media is the best thing that happened to customer service since, er, nothing else (not call center, for sure!).<\/p>\n For now, I don\u2019t see any flipside for consumers with this channel. So, I’m going to declare \u201ccustomers of the world unite behind social media customer service, you have nothing to lose but the call center hold music\u201d.<\/p>\n I do recognize that not all types of service requests (e.g. account balance) are suited for social media. Besides, banks and other service providers might ask, “what’s in it for us?” while providing social media customer service. If that question is not satisfactorily answered, they might pull the plug on this channel, citing budget, ROI or compliance-related reasons. Since I\u2019d hate to see that happening, I\u2019ll write another post covering a few areas of benefits of providing service via social media for service providers (Spoiler Alert: Call centers and websites apparently suck at cross-selling and upselling).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Around the end of 2009, my HP OfficeJet printer broke down. I logged a call with the local office of Hewlett Packard\u2019s service partner. I got no response for three days. I gave up with the vendor\u2019s local office and decided to escalate my complaint to its head office. Thankfully, the company\u2019s Vice President for … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":11828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4,7,1],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bfsi","category-digital-marketing","category-retail","category-mandatory-category","tag-social-media-customer-service"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11829,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/11829"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n