Skills to deal with complaints on social media has emerged as key to the Indian mobile phone operators’ strategy to retain subscribers, with special attention being paid to train teams to handle customers with prejudices. This is as a report in the Economic Times.
Analysts, however, say operators need to continuously evolve their learning process to react to social media as failure to put forth the right brand image on the platform could result in customers deflecting towards competition.
“Operators need to understand that different sets of training are needed to deal with customer executives on calls and those resolving complaints on social media,” said Zafar Rais, chief executive officer at MindShift Interactive, a digital outreach agency. “On social media, the reaction time is much shorter and a company needs to establish that their brand values are on a par with customer needs and one is not above the other,” says the report.
The challenges of dealing with subscriber issues on social media came to the fore when on Monday, Bharti Airtel was forced to clarify that it did not differentiate between its customers and employees on the basis of their religious beliefs, when a customer asked that her complaint be resolved by a person of a particular religion.
It started when the Airtel customer complained about the telco’s service on social media to which the company’s online team responded.
However, the customer asked that her complaint be resolved by another agent belonging to a particular religion. In the meantime, the agent was replaced by another executive who coincidently happened to belong to the religion that customer had asked for.
The matter blew up on social media, with some criticising the telco for switching executives based on the subscriber’s religious preference, prompting the market leader to clarify its stance.
But some brand experts say the damage had been done. “We live in aggressive era of social media where people react without factual data. Social media creates quick perception and Airtel’s image has been dented. It is yet to be seen how deep the damage is and it will last as long as the next incident happens,” said brand expert Harish Bijoor, in the report.
“If a customer contacts us again for an ongoing service issue then the first available service executive responds in the interest of time. We request everyone not to misinterpret and give it unnecessary religious colour. The said customer has been responded to,” said the report.
Airtel’s response team leader had also responded to the irate customer on her social media account saying they do not differentiate on ethnicity. But within the next 24 hours, the matter became viral, drawing comments from former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah.
Airtel, Idea Cellular, Reliance Jio Infocomm and Vodafone India have a social media monitoring team of around 10 employees who alert the response teams sitting across different circles on issues raised on Twitter, Facebook etc.
A co-founder of a digital marketing solutions firm, has been quoted in the report saying that telcos like other companies, need to have a separate social media guideline on issues like religion, caste, race etc. “These issues may have limited impact since telcos have a large subscriber base but they need to create such categories and have experts who can deal with such comments on social media.”