If you send a tweet to friends on Twitter and complain about Comcast, you may be surprised by how quickly you hear from Frank Eliason, director of Digital Care, or one of his colleagues.
Eliason tweets under the moniker ComcastCares, and I met him recently through such a transaction–one that led to resolution within a matter of hours of a seemingly irresolvable issue: the accidental deletion of my Comcast email account.
Through Eliason and his team, Comcast has stepped into the arena of social networks for customer service. My particular problem, transacted solely as one of the company’s 14 million internet customers, was resolved in an afternoon–after frustrating me for four days. It prompted me to find out more about social media inside a company that employs 100,000 and managed last year more than 300 million interactions with customers for cable, high speed Internet, and telephone service.
In little more than a year and a half, Digital Care, which Eliason initiated informally by tracking customer comments on blogs in September 2007, grew to a staff of 10 this year, after he was given the role officially in February 2008. He had excited the company’s interest by reaching out to bloggers a few months earlier.
“The blogosphere in general I think is phenomenal for companies because it really gives the customer story in their own words,” Eliason says. “You improve service through customer stories, not though data.”
Then came Twitter, which he calls “the here and now” of customer service, where he began actively engaging customers last April after Comcast, Twitter, and the Chicken with blogger Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. “Companies spend money on market research to discover how customers use products, and Twitter asks the question, what are you doing? It gives the answer for free,” he says.
The 18,000 customers contacted through social media and email to Digital Care since last April is little more than a drop in the bucket of Comcast’s hundreds of millions of customer interactions in that same period. However, the results are being rewarded by not only growth in staff to build these relationships, but also by a broadening of the forum. Coming soon, Eliason says, is a Comcast blog for talking with customers and listening to responses.
Source: Comcast Digital Care, Frank Eliason
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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