Verizon is one of the leading American telecommunication company with customer base more than 290 million. They provide various wireless services including internet and TV.
On Social Media, the brand has around 1.42 M followers on Twitter and 7.1 M fans on Facebook. In addition to this, Verizon also has dedicated Twitter profile for customer support with 81.7K Followers.
Further, Verizon also has support community on their main website, which is also accessible on their Facebook Page as a dedicated TAB. This community driven forums have all the required features to enable customers to ask for help and get it resolved.
Lets get into details of how they are responding to customer queries and complaints on social media.
Element 1 – Tone of Messaging
Verizon has a friendly but not too informal tone to their communication, thus maintaining the relationship professional. In addition to this, every outbound messages is accompained by the signature of the customer agent. This practise make it easier for the customer to know with whom they are talking and maintain the flow of the conversation.
Element 2 – Are they sending canned responses, without understanding the context?
Most responses are a standard and carries relevance to the context of the customer. Considering a similar type of problems which customers are facing, the response from the Verizon is pretty much the same with some variations.
Element 3 – Turnaround Time
On Facebook the average response time of At&T is around 0.4 hours and this certainly a quick turn around time. The only issue with the page is that, the fan post wall is disabled, so there is no way for other customers to view the reviews and complaints. Though as a customer you can post on their wall, the post will not be visible to the public therefore it is not possible to observe if all the complaints are being addressed. As a result, all the promotional post made by the page is filled with complaints which is take the attention away from the main post.
On Twitter the response time is around 83 minutes which is much faster. (The time is calculated based on last 792 responses made on Twitter.) On Twitter, Verizon has multiple Twitter handles to respond to the complaints.
Element 4 – Is brand following up on the complaints?
On Facebook and Twitter, in the most comments there is no follow up. It could be that the customer agent has resolved the issue offline and there is no need to, because there doesn’t seem to be any engagement from the customer side on the conversations as well. But the cases where the customers are responding back with the orginial thread of conversation, Verizon’s social media agents have responded for more clarification.
Element 5 – Is brand answering to all the queries?
On Facebook, most complaints and queries are responded, but certain complaints are not attended at all. On Twitter, the case is same only around 70% of complaints are responded.
There are certain comments on Twitter which are not responded, even the positive ones. It is always in best interest for the brand to respond to negative reviews as well as appreciate good words from the customer.
Element 6 – Is the brand present on major complaint forums?
Verizon has its own support and help forms which makes it easier for Verizon to have all their customer engagement in one place. Beside this the brand doesn’t seem to be involved in any complaints on other forums or discussions. For example, there are enough complaints and conversations on complaintsboard.com, but none of them are attended by anyone from the brand.
Overall considering the size of the business and brand, Verizon seems to be investing on responding and engaging with customers online. But the efforts on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter can be improved with faster response time and by addressing 100% concerns of the customers.