In the good old days, if you dropped the service ball, no one really knew. You might get a letter to the CEO but your secret was your secret.

Today if you drop the ball, as Dell did back in the day with a leading blogger such as Jeff Jarvis – you could risk a genuine devaluation of the brand.

But I bet that you thought that just regular customers could still be put off and no one would know.

Well, it’s a new world out there and even regular folks can make your life hell and get pay back.

It has been just 3 days since this video about United Airlines was posted by Dave Caroll – the back story is here – 466,000 views so far. My bet is that this will go into the millions and Dave has more video’s on the way!

So what is the lesson? Your customers are deeply connected now. They will harness the full power of Social Media to get back. They can really hurt you back.

Problems happen – but now you cannot afford to think that you have buried them.

You cannot ignore the power of social media – you have to get connected too. At least you have to listen and respond well. Dell rose to the occasion in the end and have become quite expert – here is how that story ended.

Looking at Dave’s Twitter account – @DaveCarroll – I see that the mainstream media are loving this story – expect this to be huge tonight on the national news services.

I wonder if this may be a turning point for Social Media and Customer Service? How can any responsible organization not get engaged now?

PS Just in – Comcast really get the use of Twitter to help with service issues – but then cannot deliver - (Peter Hirshberg) Don’t you have to have the service as well as the SM smarts? Snip:

Comcast has achieved renown for how they respond to customer service problems on Twitter. An interesting social media case study, until it happened to me.

9:45 AM. Internet and phone crash, just before a big client call. I’m a Comcast triple play customer. I got no data, only TV. Fortunately a colleague has a draft of the prezo so I’m able to call in changes from my iPhone and she sends it off before the meeting.




10:00 AM. Service is back. We start the call.




Over-the-next-hour AM Comcast service craps out twice more. Good thing for cell phones. They make everyone (including ISPs) think “land lines, who cares?”




11:00 AM I call Comcast to complain, asking elegantly “WTF?” Comcast informs me, “We can get to it in 48 hours. If you were a business customer, we could do it sooner. But you’re not.”  Worse, until they send the repair guy out to investigate, they can’t have their network people look into whether there is a problem in my neighborhood.




My response? “NOOOOOOOO.” (Cue SFX: guy throwing a fit)  ”That’s a terrible way to run a carrier. Even the phone company of yore was more on the ball.” The customer service rep assures me TINMWCD (There Is Nothing More We Can Do. Why does Jarvis get all the nice acronyms?)




And then it dawns on me:  I am An Empowered Consumer. In the Post Mass Media World. In the wake of the Jarvis Playbook I don’t need to threaten to throw a stink, I already stink! I’ve got 1,132 Twitter followers . So I wonder, if I Tweet, will anything come of it?




What follows is tweets, with commentary in red.