attention industry

But there’s a lot to learn from what happened, and it’s not just about the error made, and not just about the response.

Digital / Social needs to own customer service. This is plenty counter intuitive, but it’s the logical move. When something goes wrong in customer service, very wrong, it will almost inevitably become a social media issue. When the team in charge of social doesn’t have this information from the get go, they are unprepared and scrambling to find out what happened, and what the truth is. More important that that, customer service, in my experience, is run with the wrong objective: getting people off the phone, and making complaining more work than it’s worth. Social media, on the other hand, is run with a focus on optics, community building, and the long term effects of each interaction. Every time something gets migrated between a customer service team and a social media team, or vice versa, information and context is lost. There is no ‘private resolution’, anymore. Customer service is a glass house, and the problem isn’t thrown stones, it’s peeping toms.
It’s better to be 80% right in 2 hours, than 100% right in 8. A DAY flipped over between Regretsy posting it’s account of what happened, and PayPal correcting and apologizing. It went from December 5th, to December 6th. I don’t have a measurement in hours, but I can tell you it was too many. Even if the account isn’t 100% accurate, it’s obvious enough that this is an issue worthy of quick resolution. I can understand the need for review, revision, getting internal and external alignment, etc, but that’s less important than a response of some kind, admitting fault, and explaining you’re going to fix it. If something public saying ‘This isn’t acceptable, and we’re on it’ had appeared on multiple PayPal owned properties, immediately, this likely would have been less of a disaster. Speed matters, and everyone watching this would do well to try their best and shorten their response timelines for these issues.
Terms of Service, User Agreements, etc, need to be written in Plain English. Natural language is key. I understand the value of ambiguity, but this write up of the situation clearly points out that this was not beneficial. If your rules and regulations can’t be written clearly enough to be followed by either your users, or your staff, issues are on you. I understand the value of legal text, and I understand (to an extent) why it is written how it is, but this is wrong, for society as much as for companies and users. Why can’t we enact a simple natural language rule? Creating a series of legal agreements that can only be understood with professional help pretty much guarantees that people will either ignore, or accidentally violate, the rules.

This will happen again, in a few months, as it always does. I will note it, talk about it, and use it to remind myself that things need to change. But in the end, until we start treating every client-facing position as a media-facing position, this stuff will keep happening.

People are media outlets, now. Outsourcing contact with your customers, or lax training of customer service reps, is equivalent to letting interns run your PR department without supervision.