In addition to the time I spend objecting to and about companies and the various levels of service I experience; and besides the endless hours I while away jumping from link to link on the internet I am currently spending a great deal of time considering with what my next job should be. Of late, and after what seems to be the world’s longest mid(ish)-life crisis, I feel like there needs to be a distinct and planned approach to the next stage of my life. And barring the idiosyncrasies of my own internal thought process, it does, at times, feel as if this task consumes me.
There was also a joke I was trying to work in about having
spent the last several weeks being sick with cold and chest infection, thereby
having ‘consumption’ but I just couldn’t get the tempo of it worked out.
So as I think on and about how and where I want to take my
next venture; I also seem to be thinking about my new encounters in the Twitterverse
and my unintentional discovery of how some marketers are using this, and other
social platforms, to extend their customer service outreach. And I’m
fascinated.
@TTCHelps – the online persona of TTC customer liaison is
prompt in replying to people in a forthright manner. In fact, I tripped over them very early in my
app adoption kibitzing about the on train ‘are-they-aren’t-they’ announcements on
the subway one morning. To my flippant
tweet that I couldn’t decide if the TTC announcements were informative or
infuriating, they replied ‘hopefully more informative than annoying’ and with
that simple exchange I started to get it.
Next was @CampbellCares – the soup company that noted my
tweet complaining, while suffering my cold, that I could no longer find my preferred
Turkey Chunky soup and that the Chicken flavor just didn’t cut it. Not only did they respond; they tracked down
stores nearby that I might be able to find my favoured flavor at. Then @FURminator_Inc. favourited my tweet
about my, somewhat, bizarre affinity for their pet brush.
Ricki’s, who is not on Twitter but does use Facebook, after
announcing a sale and then having their website crash, did take the time to
answer each person who commented on the issue on the FB feed. In a world where using the comment feature to
acknowledge the issue globally is available it was a decided personal touch to
reply to each of, even if they did recycle their response.
The IKEA follow up, via a real live person, discussed in
this blog, also fell into this sweep of service responses. But I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed
that after I lauded the employee who assisted me so well to @IKEACanada five
days ago and they have yet to acknowledge my approval. And in my estimation a bit of an error on
their part.
The friend who strongly encouraged my adoption of Twitter
and its little unique universe and I have discussed my interest in both this
new (to me) medium and how it could move customer experience and service into
the most interesting places - which in turn gets me thinking, again, and more,
about where I should take my next career venture.
The next steps are not entirely, yet, apparent to me but I do
believe that service is the next great venture of business and somehow I’d like
to be involved.
