Hunter Business Chamber, Bob Ansett and customer service

At a local Business Chamber event today I noticed a couple of interesting things.

The first was that the speaker Bob Ansett referenced “Think Global but act Local”, which I could not agree with more especially considering we are about to launch Local.net. Bob is a great speaker; it was a great pleasure to listen to his fun and fantastic on the job and life experiences.

The second was a brief talk by Andrew Meyles of Forsythes that referenced the “United Breaks Guitars” music video, highlighting just how important customer service is and how the Internet can effect your business even without your being online.

I imagine the people at United Airlines would be following this (with over 5 million views at the time of this blog). But if you or an employee was to do something that resulted in such a response then you really need to really look at things in-house and you would really want to know of and engage with those effected in aid of a solution. Customer service in the web world very much requires business to keep a pulse on social interaction related to their business. Web2 people would much prefer spend 4 minutes typing up a blog post that tells the world about an experience then spent for the third time over twenty minutes on the phone explaining in very simple English without being understood and little hope for a solution.

It also intrigues me that people think it will not happen to them because they are not as big as United. Just remember this, not everyone you have a negative effect on is going to upload such an enlightening video, but as soon as someone does you can safely guess there would be lots of people willing to comment and share it within their own networks. That video has 5.4 million views but 22,000 people have added their comments to the story and 35,000 have rated it highly.