Pepco, the utility that services the greater Washington DC area, has few friends among its customer base thanks to spotty reliability. I should know, I am one of them and in the spirit of full disclosure, can tell you I have made my fair share of complaints to and about the utility.This sentiment by the way, was recently captured by American Customer Satisfaction Index when it rated Pepco Holdings the "most hated" company in America. (To understand in greater detail how Pepco earned this dubious distinction the Washington Post delivered an excellent analysis of the utility and its performance last year, tellingly entitled “Why Pepco Can’t Keep the Lights On.”)
Its service performance has prompted no end of scorn and hate on Twitter (I myself have tweeted some beauts over the years) not to mention the investment by a number of residents in home generator systems.
Local authorities and regulatory agencies are also stepping up pressure on Pepco.
In its defense, Pepco has said repeatedly it knows it needs to do better and has embarked on a five-year, $500 million program to improve infrastructure and service.
With this as background you can understand why, in the days leading up to Hurricane Irene’s predicted path of destruction up the East Coast, expectations among Pepco customers could not have been lower. Certainly, the utility went out of its way to warn customers that outages could last multiple days.
Hurricane Irene also, though, highlighted Pepco’s own Twitter initiative, which it launched after another Pepco fail in the area in July 2010: that is, a fierce, twenty minute storm that knocked the power out to 301,000 customers, in many cases for days.
In the midst of this Pepco debuted a new staffer to respond to the Tweets, and later, to write blog posts explaining the utility’s actions.
Andre Francis tweets under the handle Pepco Connect, and as the past several days, have shown, is the master of the perfect blend of soothing understanding, quiet defense of Pepco (we are getting ready for Irene!), clarifications (we asked for 600 out-of-state workers and got 150. We are asking for more) and helpful responses to run-of-the-mill service requests and problems.
Francis, in short is the perfect social media employee, at least for a company like Pepco. To be sure not every company has the same issues of Pepco - that is, a captive customer base that is taking its complaints en masse to the regulatory authorities. Still, though, the following qualities are helpful in any corporate environment.
1. He/she needs to be responsive and sympathetic, on par with a customer service advocate. No fake cheer-leading here please or vague promises of help, although it is also not necessary to go to extremes just because someone is posting or complaining on Twitter.
2. He/she needs a certain level of maturity - that is, will not be goaded into making stupid statements. This can happen, easily, even in a corporate setting.
Nestle lost any disadvantage it might have had in a campaign lodged by Greenpeace last year on Facebook and YouTube over its palm oil sourcing activities. Some of the comments it tweeted in response were seen as needlessly antagonistic or just plain stupid. To wit: "we welcome your comments, but please don't post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic - they will be deleted". This was in response to activists that had altered the company’s logo.
3. He/she needs to stay away from the legalese. Last February Citigroup launched its New Citi Blog, an effort that Slate’s now-defunct Big Money took to task for sounding too polished and corporate. Worst, at the time, it ignored the debate raging on Twitter and elsewhere about Citi’s decision to shut down the bank account of a gay social network, Fabulis.
4. Still, he/she needs to have a healthy understanding of the law, especially if this is a public company and especially if it is a financial services company. The SEC has been taking a keener interest corporate blogs and tweets to make sure they don’t run afoul of securities regulations.
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