Qwest Launches Social Media for Customer Service

Qwest began using social media for customer service recently, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. It’s remarkably nimble for a large, bureaucracy-laden, unionized labor force. I mean that as a positive — clearly, this is their social media prototype. They have not rolled social media out to their entire customer service group, but rather have just seven people tweeting.

Visit Qwest at http://socialmedia.qwest.com

Start Social Media Small, and Learn from It

For a large company like Qwest, starting with a small dedicated group with a motto of “Be Smart” will allow them to find what works and what doesn’t.

For example, what’s the best way to transfer a problem to the right person at Qwest? Perhaps when the social media team is small, transferring a customer to another department or to the normal customer service group makes sense. But once everyone in customer service has social media access, transfers should follow the normal problem resolution processes.

Use Your Social Media Team to Teach and Build

Starting small will also allow the social media team at Qwest to help develop the processes and technologies needed to integrate this technology to the Qwest CRM systems (the holy grail of customer service and social media).

The team will also be able to train other customer service reps in the ins-and-outs of Twitter as a medium (in the same way that the phone has ins-and-outs, and email has ins-and-outs, etc).

Social Media is Broadcast Customer Service

In a normal customer service situation, typically your conversation is relatively private (it’s recorded, but no one’s really going to use it unless things go COMPLETELY WRONG). But with social media, every customer interaction is out there in the open. You’re broadcasting your customer service.

Transparency good. Whining bad.

Thus, if I could make one suggestion to Qwest: tweets that say, “10 minutes until we go home for the night!” make a bad impression. Transparency is great. Whining is not.

Have you seen other examples? Is your company considering it? What questions or concerns do you have?

I’d love to hear other case studies of using social media for customer service.