Comcast and Circuit City have many things in common.
Both companies sell products and services that deliver video and internet to American consumers. They also share the dubious distinction of consistently scoring near the bottom of their respective industries in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index surveys (see here & here).
With limited competition, Comcast’s dismal rating doesn’t pose as great a risk to their future profitability as does Circuit City’s score, which is clearly reflected in their ever sinking stock price. Over the last few years, Circuit City has not executed well at meeting customer expectations. As a result, they have lost a big chunk of their base and aren’t attracting new customers as fast as the old ones are leaving. Consumer Electronics retail is a commodity industry and customers can buy their CE products just about anywhere. Bringing customers back to Circuit City should be the company’s top priority. Doing so will require a number of things, but consistently meeting or exceeding customer’s expectations would be a good place to start.
Another good place to start might be engaging with customers within their Social Media channels to better understand where the experience breaks down, and to offer unexpected support for problem resolution. Interestingly, both companies are also getting involved with Social Media. Circuit City maintains a blog on its website and both companies have started using Twitter; however, the ways in which they are using it couldn’t be farther apart.
Comcast has been receiving a significant amount of positive press from their use of Twitter. Frank Eliason, Comcast’s digital care manager and the man behind the Twitter account, comcastcares, tells me their Twitter program started back in March ’08. Using a number of monitoring tools, Frank and his small team listen to the stream of “Tweets” coming from Twitter looking for comments about Comcast. When they encounter one, they immediately reply to the person who made the comment, usually asking if they can help. As of this writing, comcastcares has made over 10,000 updates and has over 2700 followers. They operate comcastcares like some kind of proactive help desk, contacting customers who have publicly shared that they are having a problem.
Think about that for a minute.
A company that is actively trying to address every complaint made about it on Twitter. Every problem solved here equates to a customer whose expectations have been exceeded. Those customers will are going to tell others about their great experience. More importantly, by listening to its customers, Comcast is learning about the things that are getting in the way of a great customer experience. It’s a feedback loop that can be used to drive improvements into their operational programs.
Circuit City on the other hand doesn’t seem to understand the basic concept here. They established their Twitter account, Circuit_City, about the same time as Comcast, but roughly six months later, they haven’t even broken triple digits in Updates. Circuit City isn’t using Twitter to listen for and help frustrated customers or to find opportunities for improvement in their operational procedures. Instead, they are treating Twitter (and their CityCenter blog) like any another advertising channel. There is no conversation, just one-way messaging. There is no “How Can I Help You?”, there’s just “Here’s some more stuff that you should buy”. Most of the tweets are links to posts on their blog which is focused on products that Circuit City sells.
One could argue that Circuit City does not have as many detractors as Comcast, but there are clearly opportunities out there.
Earlier this week, I saw a Twitter user contemplating going to Circuit City to purchase a wireless card (see the accompanying Twitter thread). When he tweeted “Circuit City sucks! Why are they still in business?“, it would have been a great time for Circuit’s Twitter team to step in and try to salvage this experience.
Unfortunately, Circuit City isn’t listening, they are just talking. Business as usual.
An recent article written by Jen Zingsheim at Media Bullseye takes aim at the Social Media “experts” who overpromise the value and underestimate the ability to scale. Several well documented examples of companies using Social Media (Twitter specifically) to monitor for and address customer service issues have many in the social media echo chamber (myself included) urging other companies to “join the conversation”. And they should because social media provide a low-cost way for companies to learn from their customers and address their issues.
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