Combating the ‘real-time’ customer experience with some ‘right now’ expectations

As more and more brands move begin to employ social media channels as a customer service channel, consumers are beginning to believe and expect that they can get a response 24/7, 365 days a year.

There are no open and closing times to Twitter and Facebook like there are with call centres and stores. Tim Sanchez over at The Social Customer blog raises this conundrum of customers ever increasing expectations of organisations customer experiences in 2010:

Isn’t that what we’ve trained them to expect? By attempting to deliver the best possible customer experience, we’ve accelerated our response times to near-zero and shifted the expectations of our customers to levels that are nearly impossible to meet on a consistent basis. And the customers (that includes me and you) thrive on it. They want it, and the more they get it, the more they expect it.

How can you combat this? Sanchez suggests that:

Setting expectations and clearly communicating them up front is your greatest weapon against the Right Now Economy

I would also refer back to a recent blog post which states “in many instances, a positive experience supersedes the need for a positive resolution”. It isn’t always about solving the customers problems – some are unsolvable – its about providing a resolution that will please the customer, providing you with the customer retention and loyalty you seek and thus makes the time, effort and money you invest in your customer service channels worthwhile.

Read the original post by Tim Sanchez here

How do you combat the real-time web and ever increasing expectations of your customers? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

By COLIN SHAW | Published: JULY 1, 2010