Pipeline Publishing | OSS and BSS News and Info

Pipeline Publishing, Volume 7, Issue 11

	This Month's Issue:
	Sparking Innovation

Social Media Rewards and Risks, Facebook's View of the AT&T - T-Mobile Deal

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In terms of actual customer interaction, care reps sometimes respond directly to questions from customers and provide helpful tips or links to information on the operators’ web site. In the bigger picture, however, Facebook pages are intended to be entry points into each company’s existing online customer service presence. There are pros and cons to how each company executes this.

AT&T’s Facebook Challenges

The first reaction to AT&T’s Facebook page is that there’s no way to navigate to customer service (or sales) directly from the wall, other than in uncommon cases where a rep posts a link within a comment in response to a specific question. The customer support tools aren’t obvious to find either. I was looking for them, so I found them under a navigation menu item labeled “Welcome”. T-Mobile had the good sense to label this menu item “Support” which is a bit more intuitive.

There are basic usability issues in AT&T’s Facebook navigation – tested in both Internet Explorer and Firefox – that undermine the customer experience. It takes two clicks, some scrolling, and another click to access online support and self-help FAQs. When these pages are presented, AT&T has the right idea in trying to keep the user within the Facebook window, but the limited screen area cuts off most of the web page making it difficult to read and navigate. These are major barriers to usage. T-Mobile avoids this problem by simply taking the user directly to its customer support website in another tab or window.

There are also a large number of pure hate groups.

The downside is taking the user out of the Facebook comfort zone; the upside is that it works.

Another obvious issue with AT&T’s Facebook set up is that when one clicks into the customer care section, the space above the fold isn’t used optimally. The user has to scroll down to get to any navigation that leads to sales, support or service. The only action buttons above the fold are the

Facebook “Like” button and a “post to our wall” button, which doesn’t really leap out at the user. The “like” button makes sense; AT&T’s Facebook page has almost 1.4 million “likes”. But the “post to our wall” button launches AT&T’s entire main Facebook wall – including the navigation menu - within the limited viewing area, rather than taking the user back to the main wall. It’s inelegant.

The major issue with these kinds of presentation and navigation problems is that they create barriers for customers who want to access online support through Facebook. If any social media channel, Facebook being the reigning king of them all, is going to be used for customer interaction, it has to work well. There can be no artificial barriers, extra clicks, sloppy presentation, or unobvious navigation. It has to be presented right up front, and as easy to use as, say, the iPhone. My two year old can use an iPhone and iPad with ease; that’s not an exaggeration.

This speaks to another issue; Facebooks says that 250 million people visit its site monthly through a mobile device. The iPhone app is the primary form of Facebook access in my family. Anything any company does on Facebook needs to be mobile friendly. If a customer can’t use the tools provided on a widescreen laptop, it’s guaranteed that mobile access just isn’t going to fly. And, in fact, as an AT&T customer, I have no way of even accessing online customer support through the Facebook app on my iPhone.

Some Kudos for AT&T We’ll put down the lash now and give AT&T some credit for having had a dedicated social media team since 2009. “Today we have 28 customer care representatives supporting all social media channels for the brand including our mobile, B2B and U-verse offerings,” says Chris Baccus, AT&T director of social media.

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