Last week I received the following email from Dan Kassis, an employee in the Digital Media Production department at LifeWay Christian Resources here in Nashville. Dan’s one of several LifeWay employees using Twitter to help customers and his email below is a great example of what can happen when a company starts to answer their social phone.

I saw a tweet from a pastor who said that we should fix our online ordering
system because it’s “a mess.” I replied directly to him asking for more
information. I wanted to know if it was our online catalog or the online
order form that was giving him trouble. He replied with more information.
So I gave him my email address and told him to give me detailed information
on his problems. I assured him that I would forward it to people who could
help, or who would at least listen to what he was saying. I also explained
that we are beginning a process to make major improvements to lifeway.com.

The next day I saw a tweet from the pastor who said that he is “very
impressed with LifeWay’s Twitter-based customer service.” Now, we don’t
exactly have Twitter-based customer service. I mean, not in an organized
sense. What we have are several people on Twitter who are watching what
people say about LifeWay and responding professionally and with attention
to the customer. But now this customer’s perception of our company has
changed. And we weren’t even able to immediately fix his problem. But in a
way we still met a need.

[Full disclosure: Dan gave permission to republish the text of the entire email.]
[Full disclosure, part 2: LifeWay is a MicroExplosion Media client.]
[Full disclosure, part 3: Dan is related to me. He's not a brother or uncle. It's more distant than that...something like my wife's uncle is his wife's brother...I think. Still, we're related.]
[Full disclosure, part 4: I've never had this many "full disclosures" for any single post...ever.]

I’ve talked before about answering your social phone. It’s the idea that you’re paying attention to all the social media channels that may be talking about you and your company, and then engaging the people who are talking about you…whether they’re saying something good or bad. I saw an email come in over the weekend that was a correspondence between one of my clients and an upset customer. The customer had a series of very frustrating experiences with my client and chose to Tweet about all of them. Fortunately, the client answers their social phone.

The thing about answering the social phone is that once you decide to answer it, you have some decisions to make about how you’ll respond. Will you be defensive? Will you try to appease? Will you provide some kind of response that feels stale and impersonal? If any of those are your planned response, just go ahead and don’t answer the social phone to begin with. You need to be ready to engage and respond. Sometimes that means you need to explain things you cannot control. Sometimes it means you need to kindly disagree with the person. Sometimes it means you just need to show that you’re genuinely sorry.

That’s what the client did in this case…he was sorry…and it was a beautiful thing. Here’s part of the email from my client to the customer after an initial Tweet and request for an email explaining the whole situation.

“Hey man. Thanks for taking the time to email me. Let me first just say, “I’m Sorry.” I truly am sorry that it is hard to find what you’re looking for. I’m sorry that the associates there don’t seem to know what’s going on. I’m sorry we weren’t any help online. I’m sorry for the whole experience. I know how frustrating it is to take time out of your day only to get less than stellar service.”

How about that? Isn’t that the kind of response you would love from any company that provided an frustrating experience for you? In this case my client apologized and then started resolving the situation by notifying the appropriate people within the company. In fact, the customer’s complaint even alerted the company to a product ordering oversight they didn’t know about.

If you’re wondering whether this meant anything to the customer, then check out a little bit from his response…

I am floored that you picked up my twitter and actually by this whole email exchange! I was curious if I’d hear a response from you. I’m really glad I did! It’s removed the bad taste from my mouth of what happened. I appreciate the TIME you’ve spent following up with a twitter and these emails! I hope YOUR manager knows the difference you’re making for [company's] reputation to their customers! I will talk about THIS experience much more than my bad one. I promise!

The power of being genuinely sorry can begin to resolve even some of the worst mistakes and biggest frustrations.

I just found out this morning that a client I work with answered their social phone for the first time a few days ago. They have been monitoring keywords in Twitter via Tweetscan’s (UPDATE: he used Summize, not Tweetscan) RSS feeds and when a customer complained about a particular product, the listening employee responded (even though the product had nothing to do with what he does at the company.) That response got an answer to the frustrated customer and the customer had the delight of getting a question/frustration dealt with that he didn’t expect an answer on. The customer came back around in Twitter and said thanks to the client. He noted that he was impressed, and frankly, a little surprised that they were listening and responded.

This is just another case of a ringing social phone that would have gone unanswered were it not for someone listening to it. Companies put significant amounts of money into the technology, personnel, and training for inbound customer service calls, but most companies are not even thinking about the unbound social calls that are being made for the world to see but going unanswered. Your social phone is probably ringing. Are you going to answer it?