Join the [Private] Conversation: Skweal Steers Customers Offline

Skweal is a new company that aims to take all that negative chatter about your brand in social media and give it a private channel into your organization. The explicit benefit to companies besides keeping “negative feedback offline” includes real-time, on-premises comments, staff motivation and basic analytics. The implied benefit for customers is a more direct connection with the manager, and hopefully greater action taken to remedy problems.

The breakdown: Retailers post signs and stickers pointing to Skweal.com. Customers with smartphones pull it up in their browsers and the site finds the location. Feedback is then privately sent via email or SMS to the store’s manager who can take immediate action.

Skweal founder, Tyler Crowley, is betting that when presented with a convenient option to keep feedback private, customers will “generally do the right thing” – as he expressed in a healthy debate in the comments of an All Things Digital blog post by Liz Gannes.

We here at Trustworthy advocate anything that connects consumers with companies in an effort towards greater mutual satisfaction. Social, email, telephone, iPhone app – what matters most is that it’s customer convenience in the driver’s seat.

What brands might miss are the benefits of amplification and scale that come with social media customer service. Like even the best call-center representative, when the manager addresses a customer’s praise or offers a helpful solution to an issue, the whole experience dies when they hang up the phone (or in this case, swipe the touchscreen closed). The customer’s friends and followers never benefit from these interactions, silencing the digital word of mouth.

Speaking of scale, I’ve argued in the past against those who worry that social media response can’t scale in large organizations with even larger customer bases increasingly voicing opinions online. Holding that line of thinking against the Skweal model, the one-to-one nature of issue resolution is strained to call-center proportions.

Also, retailers must burden the customer with finding their location on the Skweal website to voice their opinion. Like the “best camera is the one you have” argument for camera-phones, as easy as it is to visit a URL on a smartphone, it will never be as convenient as using the platform they’re already on (Facebook, Twitter, Yelp) to speak out.

Cautions aside, if Mr. Crowley can get retailers to sign on en masse, we may see Skweal lead the next wave of the digital customer service revolution!