ZocDoc: Masters of Customer Service
If you’re someone I’ve worked with, lived with, or spoken to in the last few months, or one of the kind employees at ZocDoc that has to read and respond to my fanmail, you probably know what a big fan of them I am.
In case you’ve never heard of them (in which case you’re terribly behind the times), ZocDoc is an amazing platform for booking medical appointments online. It’s definitely a cool concept, but what really attracted me to them is their amazing customer service, much of which is conducted through Facebook and Twitter.
Opening up your Facebook and Twitter to customer support can be terrifying; it’s a lot like hanging out your dirty laundry for the whole world to see. But for a company like ZocDoc, it’s pure gold. Since their marketing budget is mainly spent on customer service, according to founder Cyrus Massoumi in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview earlier this year, the reaction and engagement they receive is overwhelmingly positive.
Despite how important it is to keep the conversation in your channel (and to develop a conversation at that) I’ve spoken to many small business owners reticent to do the same; it’s likely that many are afraid of something like the PayPal Debacle happening.
If you missed it, PayPal’s poor dealings with Regretsy caught the attention of the Internet, and fairly soon afterwards a mob armed with e-pitchforks stormed their wall (which was disabled and then reappeared with all of those posts missing).
Awkward. And terrifying. No one wants 10,000 angry posts on their wall, right?
The moral of the story is that moving your customer service into social media channels necessitates truly great customer service. It’s a solid business move (this great mashable article explains why), but more companies should be following ZocDoc’s example by backing it up with excellence.
Here at MyPRGenie, we try to help small businesses bolster their image online by offering tools to simplify more traditional PR and social media, but it’s up to each individual business to decide how far they want to go. Getting into social media is a commitment, and when you take your customer service into those avenues, you’re telling the world that you’re confident enough in your product and your staff to tell the world about it.
