1800 uhoh

I was recently intrigued to discover that 1800 Flowers has a Facebook. I liked it yesterday, mainly just because I like to follow companies who are starting to invest time and effort into developing a Social Media campaign. Boy was I in for a surprise. Apparently 1800 Flowers is having a bit of a customer service meltdown on both their Facebook Wall and Twitter Feeds. There were issues with Mom's receiving orders in a timely fashion, orders being cancelled due to high volume and not being communicated to the purchaser, volume problems with local dealers not supplying each different type of arrangement offered on their site. It's a mess. The phone Customer Service from various reports seems to be either unhelpful, or just downright inept. But, I will say this, whomever they have answering their Twitter Followers and Wall posts is doing an excellent job of turning a sows ear into a silk purse.

This goes to you Susan Pinson. Yes you. You rock. Offering to help, calling people's Moms in an effort to apologize on behalf of an entire company, taking hurtful comments and just rolling through until you can find an opening to aid. That's what we like to see! And you my friend deserve a drink for your last 48 hours of real time customer service.

While I do not know what happened as far as breakdown with 1800 Flowers, I know they are represented by a great Social Media firm whom I think does a awesome job of organically growing and promoting their business online. I also know that companies can indeed underestimate the power of Social Media. And that is what I think happened here.

This promotion would have been successful if the company had ironed out the issues with local florists before launching a social media campaign that apparently worked. Don't blame the technology, no this comes down to the basic strategy of having your ducks lined up and Good Ol' Murphy's Law. Something went very very wrong this MOther's Day weekend, and chances are it's costing 1800 Flowers more to fix the problems their customer service created than it would have to simply hire more competent people and also engage more local florists.

I don't pretend to know a great deal about the national florists industry but from what I gather reading the Tweets and Wall posts, there was a communication breakdown between 1800 Flowers and their local suppliers who were swamped with orders. You can never be busier as when you are going out of business. The service to support your social media efforts has to be there, if it isn't you will experience the EPIC FAIL that was encountered this Mother's Day.

I make no issue with hiring outside firms to handle your social media, in fact for medium to large companies I am in support of it, to an extent. But within the company there has to be equal if not greater support and understanding, training on these platforms so they can be tracked, utilized, & understood. Something tells me if the supervisors at the customer service call centers had been trained on what the SocMed firm was doing there would have been a lot less budget loss and a greater customer service impact. These things have to work together.

Rant over, but please give Susan some cred people. She's doing an awesome job taking the heat. Go easy on her.