Wanting to Market via Social Media - Start with Customer Service

I had an amazing experience with a major telecoms company who shall remain nameless. As the story goes, somewhere in a very dark boardroom, months ago a decision was made to change their High Definition channel lineup and that long time customers would be grandfathered to keep the full lineup at the same price. Unless, that is, they made ANY changes to their account. I say very dark boardroom, because no one thought to exclude the addition of a high definition set top box to the potential loss of the high definition channels. Fast forward six months to this week. We lose nearly all of our HD channels and can't figure out why. We are told that there was a realignment some time ago and it just hit us this week.

Social media to the rescue, I immediately search Twitter for other disgruntled customers (finding none) and can't imagine that I'm the only account in the US to have gone through this, if indeed a new policy was put in place, stripping channels but not reducing the cost appropriately.

Enter "Chris", the rep on Twitter for said company. He listened, he researched, he found out the sad news about the very dark boardroom decisions and still said that he'd go to bat for me.

Now, if said telecoms company had tried to "market" to me via social media, espousing the virtues of their HD program, I would had "unfollowed" them so fast... and appealed immediately to their competitor to see if they were interested in a new customer.

But Chris saved the day. He negotiated a "loyal customer discount" for us that more than covers the return of our HD lineup. [unbeknownst to me my husband had already agreed through normal customer service channels to pay the upgrade)

A few days ago I was ready to bail on this company. Today I'm not only happy, but tweeting about the virtues of Chris, the Twitter rep. And, ordering a new HD set top box for my mother-in-law across the street.

Thinking about marketing online? Start with revolutionizing your customer service first. Read What Would Google Do if you want more reasons why this is a great strategy.