Takeaways can be a fascinating thing – you read a blog post and your takeaway could be completely different from what the author may have intended it as!
Molli Megasko’s post on Spin Sucks titled, ‘Steve Jobs Answers Emails‘ was set up as ‘Are you with Jobs or (the student) Ms. Isaacs?’. And here I am, drawing parallels on a different tangent – should Steve Jobs even respond to customer emails?
I aired (as is customary, these days) this on twitter with the Anand Mahindra example. Should a CEO-level person be handling customer complaints on Twitter?
One, the accessibility on Twitter makes it an obvious choice for the mode of communication. Earlier, annoyed customers had to dig in for contact details to escalate problems – now, escalation may be a tweet away.
Two, the complaint goes public – see my earlier post titled, ‘Whine flu‘, on this topic of going public with complaints before you give an opportunity for the brand to respond, in private.
My questions, then, include,
1. Is responding to customer complaints part of the tasks of a CEO. Like Anand Mahindra, for instance?
2. If yes, what is the difference between him and the customer service person of his organization? The point here is about discoverability – Anand is easily discoverable on twitter, but that does not mean he’s the everything-of-Mahindra-Group – there are specific people/teams for doing specific tasks.
3. If he starts responding to a few, is that scalable at all, when the floodgates open? It may even dilute his own personal Twitter feed with customer complaint/query tweets.
A better way, perhaps, would be to direct complaints to the right person internally, but with a note to the person complaining that the referred person is the point of contact people should be asking this question to – with name and contact details perhaps. In such a case, the CEO is using his reach/influence to point to people the right channel within the organization who is mandated with responding to and actioning customer queries.
I had a range of interesting opinions on twitter about this.
Ruchika ‘chicalit’: “as a customer how he chooses to solve my problem is not my issue. The fact that he responds is.”
Vedant Varma: “Think it’s about proving a point, internally. As well as leading by example. The team then has to deliver. And also start using tools like Twitter. As we all know, most managers in India are definitely not early adopters.”
Tarun ‘probablytrippy’ Tripathi: “I guess direct attention from MD fixes the “innate” organisational problem much faster 🙂 plus its great press!”
I agree with Ruchika’s perspective – it is a great gesture indeed. And one that trumps all PR efforts collectively! My question is on scalability. If he thinks he can do the same for 20 people vs 1,000+ people…or at least has an internal process to make it happen, it perhaps is a scalable model indeed.
Vedant has a very valid point on leading by example. Perhaps, it is quite appropriate to kick-start this process, at the CEO-level, but gradually moving ahead by politely directing complaints to the right person may be the way to ease this task out of his plate.
Tarun’s ‘great press’ angle is indisputable. It indeed is! I’d perhaps worry about the scalability issue too, along the same press triumph. More people coming to know that the CEO is responding on Twitter is akin to opening the floodgates. People may even want to ignore first/legitimate channels of service and head directly to the CEO (as Anaggh Desai, an actual CEO, asks on twitter), which makes a mockery of the channels put up in place for the purpose. You can’t blame the people complaining or expect them to understand such internal processes either – for them, their issue is top priority, while a brand/organization may need to prioritize on addressing issues.
The scalable and meaningful model, in that case, is to make the customer service process efficient, internally. The fact that people choose to complain to the CEO is very similar to a what happens in smaller grades, in school. A small boy gets hit by another boy, and instead of going to their class teacher, he heads straight to the school’s principal.
Will you blame the kid? He’s a kid and perhaps doesn’t trust his class teacher enough to intervene fast or in a just manner. The principal’s task then it to question why he, the principal, was involved in the first place and set things right, internally.