CEO fixes an issue from overseas via Twitter, a valuable customer service lesson

When your customer service takes a hit

There are few things that grinds our gears like bad customer service. The idea of giving our hard-earned money to a business who doesn’t value their customers (their main source of income) is hard to wrap our minds around. That is, until we are no longer on the consumer side of things and on the business side instead.

Think about all the customer emails, phone calls, questions, and complaints that fill our desk, our email, our voicemail, and anything else with available space. Responding to all of them seems like an overwhelming and impossible feat. We become guilty of our own pet peeve, giving bad service with delayed responses, and unanswered questions, telling ourselves we’ll find the time later – but do we ever really find the time?

If the CEO of Shutterstock can find the time, so can we.

Taking frustrations to Twitter

Recently, a customer was perusing the web for premium stock photo packages when he stumbled upon Shutterstock’s page. He decided on the package he wanted, and proceeded to checkout, when he received the error message: “You can’t pay digitally for your chosen option”. Bearing in mind the technological advances available to us today, and the mere fact that it’s the 21^st century, I’m sure you can imagine his bewilderment as he was provided an outdated payment form to fill out.

That is when he, like a typical millennial, took to Twitter to express his frustration. In protest of the primitive payment form, he sent out a simple tweet:

“Just found a website where you can’t pay online *cough* Shutterstock *cough* welcome to 1994.”

And in less than ten minutes Jon Oringer, the CEO of Shutterstock, responded to him directly. Yes, you read that right – not an office full of part-time marketing interns, or a social media team made of recent graduates, but the actual Chief Executive Officer.

Getting the support team on it

After the customer explained a little more to Jon, why he was dissatisfied, Jon responded “@MarsDorian let me look into this – and make sure we fix whatever is wrong. @sstksupport will be contacting you”; and just like that, the customer support team at Shutterstock was on the phone helping him fix his problem.

I’m sure there are a million other things Jon, the CEO of a billion dollar company, could have been doing at that very moment – like working on the new release of their visual dashboard for Tabs, or developing some other way to make the people already obsessed with Shutterstock even more obsessed – but he still found the time for a customer.

Now, if he can do that, how the heck are we comfortable making excuses, claiming to be too busy to provide the customer service we know they deserve?

No problem too small

All of this to say: as a business owner, there is no acceptable excuse for sacrificing good customer service, especially not time. We’ve all been too busy, out of time, and overwhelmed but even then, we have to take good care of our customers because without them we’d have no business to be overwhelmed by.

So, to all of the business owners who’ve dropped the ball on customer service, I challenge you to set aside the time and energy to better serve your customers.

#CustomerService