Social Customer Service - proving you failed?

A great comment by Guy Letts to my previous post on Acquisition versus Retention made me write this one - the comment is only half an hour old but blew my mind:

There's another example of how ridiculous is the pursuit of NEW rather than getting the basics right. Some large companies now boast of their wonderful NEW customer service credentials by issuing PR showing staff with banks of screens monitoring Twitter and Facebook for complaints. This is a big FAIL in my view. Customers usually only resort to bad reviews out of frustration and when it has proved utterly impossible to contact the company directly to fix a straightforward problem.

It's like employing more moppers when the bathtub is overflowing, when you should be turning off the tap.

Why acquisition beats retention

In a short conversation with Graham Hill today, the topic of acquisition versus retention was brought up. My response to Graham's initial question was "human nature":

@GrahamHill: If only banks, utilities, telcos put as much effort into retaining customers as they did into acquiring them < human nature

and my second one was elaborating on that:

@GrahamHill Retention never gets as much attention as acquisition. Leads, customers, employees, or even cars, mistresses, jobs ;-)

2010 - year in review

2010 marked the first full year of blogging for me. I loved every second of it, letting myself be driven by The Circle of Inspiration that this outside world is, Twitter, Blogs and comments all leading one to the other. On a side note, I commented an estimated 150-200 times on other people's blogs

At the end of the year I made an extraordinary effort to squeeze out 100 posts exactly. With an average of 8 for every month, that meant December saw 12 posts - not every one of them that toned down and razor-sharp as I would have liked it

Disclaimer number two: my stats don't cover the full year. I didn't enable Google Analytics until somewhere in June / July, so what you get is what you see up there: stats for half the year