Getting REAL Results with Social Marketing: The Case of UPS

Getting REAL Results with Social Marketing: The Case of UPS

Posted by Kathleen Booth on Jul 15, 2010 in Blog | 2 comments

Here at Quintain Marketing, we’re big fans of UPS. About 90% of the products we sell are delivered to our customers by a shipper and UPS has been our shipper of choice since we started the company in 2006. Why do we love UPS so much? They’re reliable, courteous, consistent, and great at communicating with their customers.

After 4 years of stellar service from UPS, you can imagine our suprise when one of our suppliers called us to say that they were having trouble shipping an order out because our UPS account was listed as “inactive.” The call came on July 5 and we quickly discovered that our customer service representative (who has always been great at working out problems) was on vacation for the week and not reachable. When several phone calls to various UPS customer service lines did not resolve the issue, we were left feeling like our 4 year relationship was quickly going down the tubes and Fedex might be our future shipper of choice.

That was the case until we took our complaint to Twitter, where we sent a short (140 characters or less, of course!) shout out to Evan (@evanatups), a member of the UPS corporate Customer Relations team. Within 4 minutes of our tweet, Evan responded with a direct message asking for more information, and within one hour, we got a call from Evan AND a call from UPS corporate letting us know that the problem had been resolved.

The real secret to stellar customer service isn’t avoiding mistakes or problems altogether – that would be impossible – but in making sure that any problems that DO arise are handled quickly and efficiently with minimal impact on your customers. Our interaction with UPS is the perfect example. Evan’s use of Twitter to quickly resolve our problem made a lasting impression and convinced us that UPS truly is the most customer-friendly shipper around! Way to go UPS!