Making Sure Customers Get the Online Help They Need: Blogs, Tweets, and Forums

I don’t mind giving some big credit to the TWCable Help/Online Care Team every chance that I get. They work really, really hard monitoring Twitter and our Facebook page for customer care problems and getting people in touch with real solutions. They also take more than their fair share of static from Internet tough guys who say some really, really awful stuff to them all day long.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the truest measure of someone’s character is how nicely they treat someone that has to be nice to them no matter what.

That’s a digression, though.

I’ve noticed that we are getting more and more care-related comments here on Untangled. Some people are posting issues that relate, at least tangentially to the topic of the post – HBO GO problems in an HBO GO post, iPad issues in an iPad post are fine. Other folks just seem to pick any old post at random, then leave a cry for help in it. I think this happens when people are frustrated with the call center, maybe not super-savvy Web users, and just Google the first thing that occurs to them and leave a comment on the first search result.

That’s fine, too. The Internet is for everybody, and we want to help as many people as we can, whenever we can.

However, this blog was not designed to become an Online Care outpost. And our Online Care team is really pretty swamped between Twitter, Facebook, the Broadband Reports forums, and who know what else they’re tracking every day. I move around a lot, and often approve comments as they come in, which often means I’m doing this from my iPhone in the back of a cab in the middle of the night. I don’t always know the answers to everyone’s problems, but I feel that we’re obligated to provide some degree of a solution. That’s what we signed up for when we started this blog.

I’ve learned that every single social outpost we create will become a listening post for care issues. It’s just how the business goes.

So here’s what we’ve come up with:

Once a day, typically in the late afternoon, a representative from @TWCableHelp will review all the comments on this blog for the past 14 days. When appropriate, they’ll respond and get the commenter into a dialogue that is meant to resolve the problem. We don’t want to overburden the team with another place to track and respond in real-time, but we do want customers to get the help they need.

All this points to a much bigger need: some sort of an online forum with customer care as a primary focus.

So we’re building one.

We are developing larger, more involved Online Care forums that will not only allow agents to manage care in what we *hope* is a more controlled, easy to follow environment – but will also allow customers to help one another. We’d love to see a place online where people can get the care they need the moment that they need it, without having to call into a call center, wait on hold, any of that stuff. Call centers aren’t cheap to run, and nobody likes calling them, either.

All that is going to be a long time coming, though. We’re hoping for sometime in 2012, but beyond that, I have no date. You better believe that I’ll announce it here, though.

Categories: Customer Care, Future of the Industry, In the Community, What's New