above the fold (social media)

It's no secret that a top priority for many businesses is to provide their potential and current customers with top-notch support. By utilizing social media technologies, companies of all sizes can help solve problems, answer questions, and generally offer guidance in a public manner.

As we all know, there are tons of places for customers to offer feedback on a company's goods or services. It's imperative that your company is present – monitoring the socialmediasphere by using tools such as SocialMention, Topsy, and the like.

Rather than go in-depth on what customer service is, I’d like to cover some Good, Bad, and Ugly examples of companies that use social media technologies to provide support to their users.

The Good - SEOMoz.

As a jack-of-all-SEO-trades company in a highly technical niche, managing customer expectations and offering support seems like anything but simple. Just think about it. You’ve got customers with varying levels of expertise, an impressive array of tools, and a global user base.

On top of that, being in the Software-as-a-Service industry means that there’s a strong dependency on server platforms, user data, and user privacy – bringing the total count of ‘things that could go wrong’ up a few thousand notches.

So, how do they do it?

Incredibly well.

You’d think that SEOMoz is selling pet rocks or something. They make it look like a breeze. After having some issues with Open Site Explorer, I shot off a simple tweet to the SEOMoz twitter account. After a very brief back-and-forth, we were able to get the issue resolved completely – leaving me quite satisfied.

As I follow SEOMoz on Twitter, I constantly see them interacting, assisting, and generally being there for their users. It’s great to see this level of assistance, and this strong focus on support keeps me coming back time and time again to use their excellent tools.

Nice work, SEOMoz.

The Bad: Google Places

Shame on you, Google.

With their near-monopolistic share of the search market and the increasingly localized SERPs, if you do SEO, you simply cannot ignore Google Places. And, if you’ve had the pleasure of not ignoring Google Places, I’m sure you’ve had had your fair share of problems with the service.

Simply put, Google treats you as if you are guilty unless proven innocent.

When you combine vague listing guidelines, swift punishment, and no answers, what do you get? A consistently terrible, un-Google-like user experience. You’d think if anyone could figure out how to support a service that they promote so heavily, it would be Google. Heck, even Yahoo and Bing have a direct line to a real human who can help you with your business listings.

Now, Google Places doesn’t really use traditional social media channels, but they do have a Google Places Help forum, which is certainly a form of social media. They create a place where people can discuss their issues, and receive assistance from veterans who used to be in their shoes.

Thankfully, Google has realized that Google Places is a place where those with good intentions come to get stress headaches and rage blackouts. As Mike Blumenthal recently wrote, Google is beginning to make considerable investments in the support structure for Places – which is obviously something that they are in dire need of.

Seriously – just check out the comments on his post. It’s turned into a mini places help forum itself.

If you haven’t experienced any of these issues, consider yourself a lucky person.

The Ugly – Ocean Marketing

Here’s what happens when things get ugly.

When your customers ask you simple questions, such as “Hey, where is that video game controller I ordered a few months back?” it’s best to answer them. If your answers aren’t helpful, they may seek clarification.

If they ask another clarifying question, don’t threaten, lie, swear, and generally go postal on them in a barely legible manner for asking where their product is.

Well, that’s exactly what Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing did. This man has essentially written the book on what NOT to do when tasked with managing a company’s customer base.

Due to his blatant disregard for customer service, his appalling emails were shared on Penny Arcade (a well known comic & gaming site) and seen by millions.

What happened here is going to go down in history as one of the most epic customer service fails of all time. If you haven’t heard of this, I’d politely ask you to step out from under your rock, and read this, and for full breakdown, this.

Things have been getting nasty for Christoforo. His phone hasn’t stopped ringing, his personal information is being leaked, and various ‘Internet Detectives’ have been pulling up every bit of dirt they can find on him.

They’ve found that Ocean Marketing’s website is filled with copyright violations. ‘Blog Posts’ that are copied and pasted from Forbes. Shady business practices have been exposed, link profiles have been examined, and dishonest reviews have been found across the web. They’ve even dug up domestic abuse charges from a few years back.

The Internet community is vast, but very tight-knit. Disrespect to one means the potential for disrespect for all. Since this story broke, the companies associated with Christoforo have been doing extensive damage control to attempt to remedy the situation.

They are faced with a massive uphill battle, and it’s anyone’s best guess if they’ll be able to recover.

Bonus – The Excellent – Summit Beer

Since I didn’t want to end on a bad note, here’s an excellent example of customer service via social media. This one actually happened to me.

Here in Minnesota, we are privileged enough to have no shortage of excellent local breweries. One in particular stands out - Summit Beer. I am a regular purchaser of their excellent beers, my favorite being their Winter Ale. It’s just fantastic. Dark and malty, but not spiced like many others.

Anyways…

I purchased a 12 pack of bottles from my local liquor store after a hard day’s work. Upon opening, I was shocked to find this:

Yeah, that’s a shattered beer right in the middle. Poor guy.

Since I follow @summitbeer on Twitter (and they follow me), I figured I would just let them know via a tweet. I was also curious to see how they would respond. I tweeted them that picture at 8:40PM on a Tuesday evening, and I received this tweet in response, FOUR MINUTES LATER:

“Shoot us an email at [redacted] and we’ll fix this Scott!”

Seriously. Four minutes. On a Tuesday night. That’s a simply amazing turnaround. I promptly emailed them, and received a response from the Quality Assurance Manager, apologizing for the inconvenience and telling me a bit about how that can happen.

I was blown away.

They offered to give me a fresh 12 pack for my troubles. I was just so impressed by their service, that I turned them down. Just the fact that they offered to give me a free 12 pack, simply because a single bottle was broken is outstanding.

I’ve always been a Summit fan, and I’ll always be from here on out. Amazing work, guys. I owe YOU a beer.

Well, that about covers it. As you can tell, companies that do customer service right tend to get praised often, and those who do customer service poorly usually end up with quite a mess on their hands.

Got any examples of your own of good, bad, or ugly customer service stories? Please share them in the comments below, tweet at us @iexposure, or find us on Google+!

Image by ElmerCat and licensed through Creative Commons. 

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