Marketing is not the only thing in the throes of revolution. The old customer service mentality of waiting for the customer to come to you needs an update as well. StubHub is a beta user of Scout Labs and they are definitely taking a fresh approach to customer service.
Service is incredibly important to StubHub and they have a huge team of reps ready and eager to take care of calls and emails when they come in. But inbound call volume have been dropping in recent years, even while customers and revenues increase. The reason? Customers have additional channels for expressing their frustration these days. If someone buys tickets that are invalid, customers are starting to turn to blogs, Twitter, and message boards before they pick up the phone. Now, by seeking out complaints and problems expressed in social media, StubHub’s service team is proactively solving customer problems — a move that is surprising and delighting customers.
Scout Labs experiences this ourselves — no matter how often we give out our customer service contact information, we often find user questions and problems on blogs or on Twitter first. Of course, by using our own product, we find them right away and take care of them, but it’s a brave new world indeed.
Photo source: www.gatorboosters.org
Stubhub failed me today. I had followed links to the Sox/Nat’s game all the way to purchase and then once they were purchased it advertised another game as having been purchased. I have no way of proving that this is what happened I had to talk to three different people who told me three different policies. Still waiting to hear from technical staff who will determine if a technical error actually occured, which you know they will say no because as I have found out they have to eat the money if the website messed up.