The Bolin Marketing Blog

I have been getting a lot of questions about the work we’re doing for Carma Labs, makers of Carmex Lip Balm.  These questions usually center around online customer service, and how we advise Carma Labs.  Since this topic of online customer service, and how it ties in with services like Twitter, seems to be interesting to a lot of you, I would like to share my experience and thoughts.

Corporate culture is probably the most important key in the success or failure of any online customer service initiative.  Paul Woelbing, the President of Carma Labs, had told us about how he answered every letter sent to him, regarding their products.  We immediately knew there was an existing behavior that would benefit more Carmex users, by taking this online.

One of the immediate benefits of answering questions online, pertains to search, making those answers available to everyone.  Now you probably won’t have to answer the same question 20 times.

A lot of clients are fearful of people pointing out flaws with your product or service.  Answering questions about problems shows that you are aware of a problem, and working on a solution, instead of trying to dismiss or bury the problem.  In extreme cases, this can also mean you can catch problems that would eventually kill your product or service.  They may be small fixes, or big ones, but you’ll probably know before you spend major money marketing something that no one will like.

We deliberated on what platform to use for quite awhile (a month or two).  A lot of people I spoke to, thought Twitter would be a great way handle some of the items mentioned above.  While there are a few questionable success cases, your organization has to be set up to handle a few things differently.

1. Twitter users tend to expect immediacy in response.  Taking over a day to respond is usually not perceived as a good response time.  (I’m still waiting (months) for responses from several companies I sent messages to on Twitter)  This means you’ll probably have to delegate this duty as a part or full-time job.
2. Good luck answering all your questions in 140 characters, or less.  While some questions or responses can be answered in brevity, this requires a separate platform to link your tweet to a full response.  This could be a blog, or forum.
3. It’s pretty unreasonable to expect one or two people for most organizations to have access to all the answers.  This means they’ll either need direct access to the subject matter experts for those questions, or you’ll have to have more than one person for your company on Twitter.  We’ve seen both examples in Zappos and Comcast.
4. This also gets us to the problem of consistency of voice, and perception of brand.  How do I communicate that I’m an official or unofficial voice of an organization?  Best Buy is a good example of this issue.  Internally it may all make sense, but from an outsider’s view, it can cause confusion.

There has been a lot of hype centering around the usage of Twitter for online customer service.  It may work for your organizaton’s online customer service.  We decided to opt for the Getsatisfaction.com platform, because of the issues mentioned above.  Most importantly, it was the platform the client felt most comfortable using.  In the end, that is probably the biggest factor.  Take a look for yourself, and let us know how you think Paul and Carmex are doing with online customer service?