For decades together, the traditional customer support paradigm worked like a charm. Businesses were happy with a ‘good’ ratio of positive to negative experiences. Over time, that ‘good’ ratio has grown steadily, like seaweed on a pier.
Today, it’s a social world. There’s no ‘good’ ratio anymore. For your business, the difference between a negative experience and a catastrophe is almost nothing. As much as social media amplifies the good things about your business, it has a more powerful effect on the not-so-good things as well.
The concept of emergency response has to be finely ingrained in your customer support approach itself. Yes, this necessarily includes your helpdesk software too! Let’s take a small example, in the case of a web-based product/service.
A very common case is that of a service outage. One customer tweets about it. A few more pitch in. And, before you know it, the whole World knows you had an outage. If your first official response, in this case, is delayed or insufficient, you can as well get into a bunker underground.
What if your support rep doesn’t know what to do, or isn’t around, at the time? Well, that’s exactly why you need a really smart helpdesk software! Of course, if you use Zoho Support for your business, you wouldn’t need to worry about this situation at all!
Zoho Support has automatic social escalation built right into it. You can just setup an escalation rule wherein if several tweets containing your business’ name appear in a span of a few minutes, the support manager gets notified by email/SMS. This is just one example of where it can come in handy. You can think of many more relevant situations, I’m sure.
We use this internally at Zoho. In fact, our helpdesk coord simply loves it.
But, you don’t have to take our word at all. Try it yourself. Just set the rule up once. You’ll probably be as cool as a cucumber during your Code Red moment!
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