Customer Service and Social Media

We live in time of instant communication. Thanks to social media we can send or post messages and pictures, or share experiences within a second. Now, businesses are finding that social media is a new challenge for their customer service. In recent years angry customers have become increasingly more confrontational, militant and aggressive online.

Businesses are finding that even though social media has helped them register complaints so that they can make informed decisions to better serve customers, they're finding that it can also lead to outrageous, unmitigated abuse of customer service personnel, and cannot be relied upon as fact.

Organizations, stores and restaurants know that bad customer service exists, but recently more and more customers are coming in looking for a fights, wanting to post a scanting review, wanting retribution for an unknown or yet-to-occur transgression. Businesses have reported that today, it's not uncommon for customers to scram at a employee, to insult their intelligence, call them horrible names and even threaten to have them fired. They don't want resolution to their problem, they want to know their complaint resulted in the person being terminated.

Some angry customers have taken pictures with their camera phones, threatening to have them fired, and some people will post the photos with hateful commentary and even name them on their Facebook and Twitter pages. One employee even said a customer videotaped an entire conversation with a customer service rep on his phone. The customer posted it on YouTube with the rep's name, referred to her as "a stupid pig" and encouraged further confrontation from strangers. He tagged the large organization's Facbook page, so its members and co-workers all saw the video berating and humiliating the rep. It was quickly removed.

So many times companies have found online reviews of the organization and staff that include unfounded claims of racism and theft, reviews that are sexually explicit and overtly racist themselves and a good number are almost entirely false, based in the childish frustration that the customer simply didn't get his or her way, even when the demand was unreasonable and the customer was offered every possible solution.

I can't believe this is what some people have stooped to. I hope you are not one of them.