Social Media … reason why Service
failure recovery becomes more important
Risa Hemtasilpa 01-05-14
For service business, Service failure recovery is a must
thing to focus on. Why? Because nature of service depends on individual, and
quality is difficult to control. As social media becomes one of daily activity
which people all of the world involve with,
service failure tracking needs to do as fast as possible; especially in
Thailand.
In Thailand, Click, Share and Comment are popular activities
on social media. People addicted to consume other’s information via both social
media and websites such as Pantip. “Drama” and “beautiful world” are the words
that could give you a sign that what Thai people today like to consume. Thai people create words on what they are
consuming or engaging with. “Drama” means sad story of other people and
“beautiful world” called person who think too positive and close their eyes
from the truth that real world also has bad side. Consequently, bad experiences
are counted on one of drama which means people like to share and consume….
Which also means the negative WOM and impact on social media will spread big
and quick.
This statement could prove by a survey from Positioning
Magazine, showing percentage of people behavior when they face bad service. The
result shows 51 % of people in Thailand will share negative experience online,
which is a significant higher than world average (26%)! This also reflect
nature of Thai people they are introvert (They don’t like to reveal what they
think and also their negative emotion).
At first I think that why people complain online in their
Facebook or Pantip, doing this cannot solve their problem at the first place. Face
to face complain once the problem occur can get recover faster and easier.
However I understand all things on the next day, the day that I went to have a
service at one bank near my house. I asked about fee of transfer money from
different province account via mobile banking and the staff ended up with the
answer “I don’t know, I’ve never used this application”. What! Common this is
just a basic question that bank staff should know and even she doesn’t know she
should ask others or her senior rather than answer this to customer. I was
about to tell her that there is no fee if transferring via mobile after I tried
it myself but she was on phone talking to her friend about herself?!?! After the
transaction finish I want to comment it on Facebook or Pantip immediately and I
truly understand that why people chose to comment online…sometime is not about
nature of characteristic but it is about opportunity to make a comment or
sometime it’s useless to make a comment to person who has not have service
mind.
The solution for service business in Thailand nowadays to
prevent negative social media share is to create ways to track service failure
as fast as possible and recover it before customers leave the company to
comment on social network. What company do today makes them get feedback too
late such as mystery shopping and call back to let customers give service score
which research result will release a few weeks later or at the end of the month
etc.
Reference : Positioning Magazine, Part 1 Consumers are not
loyalty and 80% of Thai people are ready to switch brand, released on 19 Mar
2014.
