michael pucher

 Social CRM Best Practices - Part 4: the importance of the #FAIL tweet

Back in the days people complained about failed products or bad customer service but no further action took part. The best you could get was a letter to the editor in a newspaper or magazine. In todays world, those complaints are on twitter near real-time. And those complaints spread on social networks. So if you are the provider of the that given product or service you have luck that those tweets are most times marked as #FAIL. Back in the days you were not able to catch that information.

I don’t think we need an example here. We’ve all seen those tweets or even tweeted them ourself. The #FAIL tweet is considered by many as fun or noise (there are even bots and blogs that retweet all those #FAIL tweets). The #FAIL tweet even became pop culture:

Beaker (from the Muppets) fails

But there is real value in those #FAIL tweets. You should monitor those tweets (as already written before) and turn them into the following opportunities:

• provide direct help by interacting with the given user
• ask yourself how you could eliminate the root cause (as described in the excellent book “The best service is no service” by Bill Price and David Jaffe from amazon.com)
• product innovation and improvement

So the steps to use the #FAIL tweets to improve your products or services would be:

1. Monitor and interact
2. Eliminate root causes
3. Spread the word on eliminated root causes and/or product innovation
4. Get happy customers
5. Profit :)