Category Archives: social media

My faucet breaks and it gets me thinking about warranties, CRM and how social media pushes change within organizations. Why is the social media response team at Moen not part of the call centre that deals with warranties? They could have saved themselves some bad PR on their Facebook page. But even before that, why is the product ownership and warranty information not making better use of the digital channel?

Altimeter consulting is talking about the career path of the social media strategist and the danger of evolving into simply a help desk. As long as social media is seen as something that is part of the marketing dept or worse yet, something that a junior can work with the agency then brands and their parent organizations are going to have trouble.

Back to Moen. Here’s how I would have like to see the digital channel and specifically social media integrated into their brand promise.

1. Validate your warranty by going online and providing all your contact info. In my case, Moen discovered my faucet needed redesigning to avoid a rust out. They had no way to contact me and let me know that if I had problems that my faucet would be replaced.  They had to wait for me to complain, provide an address and then promise to send me a new one, which at that point I let them know I didn’t want it if was the same as the old one which let to the “but we discovered the problem and have re-designed it”. In other words they knew all along.
2. Put the Help URL and phone number on the product, preferable on the parts you see when you are installing or fixing it.
3. Have one point of contact that is available 24/7. Social media doesn’t respect holidays or late nights. If I am fixing my sink in the middle of the night and get pissed off enough to complain, better to do it to the call centre (private one on one) than on a Facebook page, twitter feed or forum (one to many public).
4. Get a replacement to the customer before they are into the “fix” too deep. Moen replaced the faucet as per the warranty so I should be a happy customer right? Well not really. Because they had failed on all the above stuff, I had come to the conculsion that I was replacing the faucet, wasn’t buying another Moen, gone to the store and bought an American Standard so that we would be without a kitchen sink for only an hour. End result – I have an American Standard faucet which I like (as much as one gets excited about this stuff), had a bad product experience with Moen, a Moen warranty experience that was good and my neighbour has a new (free) Moen to fix their Moen that had the same problem that we did.

So, you can see that any company that prides itself on high quality manufacturing and accompanies that with a solid warranty really needs to review their customer service, their databases and how their organization is structured.