Digital CPG Blog

On Monday, we talked about how word-of-mouth is primarily still an offline phenomenon. But one thing still spreads far and wide online, and that’s bad customer service experiences.

“The Customer Experience Impact 2010 report reveals that 82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer service experience,” reports Tech Crunch. “Of consumers who took to social media sites including Facebook and Twitter to publicly air a complaint, 58% expected a response from the company, 42% expected a response from a company within a day, but only 22% said they’d actually gotten a response as a result of griping there.”

And expecting to receive great customer service online is only a growing trend: “In 2007, 60% of U.S. consumers said when they had a negative customer experience, they wanted to speak to a live agent about it. At that time, 26% preferred email, 5% chat, but Facebook and Twitter weren’t used by corporations to handle complaints and resolve problems. This year, 83% of U.S. consumers said they wanted to speak to a live agent, 66% preferred email, 12% chat, and 7% choose social networking sites when trying to resolve a problem.”

Do you have a presence on social media that is consistent and helpful? If not, how will you ensure your customers are being heard?