Some retailers don’t conduct customer service on Facebook
While a number of retailers leverage Facebook as a means to promote goods and services, few are making use of it as a customer service tool. A recent survey from customer service vendor StellaService suggests as many as one-quarter of retailers failed to respond to inquiries and questions written on their Facebook pages' walls and in the comments section.
Five major retailers, including J. Crew and RadioShack, failed to respond within 48 hours of a wall post, while 13 merchants didn't respond to an inquiry published in the comments section. Even worse, a number of retailers, such as Victoria's Secret, even deleted the comment without a response – a critical mistake for any social media-savvy business.
"For service and support-oriented companies to open themselves up and extend themselves to their Facebook brand page, they have to accept that their customers are there," says Wendy Lea, CEO of StellaService’s Get Satisfaction Inc. division.
More than 850 million people have Facebook accounts, so it's pivotal that if retailers decide to leverage the social site as a marketing tool, they also commit to conducting customer service on it.
