I just read “Social Media Customer Service is a Failure,” one post in a series that Frank Eliason wrote for Brian Solis’ blog. Eliason is Senior Vice President of Social Media at Citibank, yet he writes that social media has flopped as a tool for improving the customer service experience.

“The other day,” Eliason writes, “someone tweeted me asking about current costs of phone calls versus the cost per Tweet for customer service. Ugh! This is new media and yet we’re already focusing on old metrics. The truth is that the service world has been broken for years because of the emphasis on handle time or calls per hour. Companies do not want to talk to you, and it shows.”

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Eliason is right, because the more you try to save money by cutting human interaction out of customer service, the worse it becomes. He makes the following suggestions for making sure that a customer-centric attitude is really in place within your company:

• Stay nimble and refuse to become stuck in antiquated processes that prevent change.

• Stop being afraid of your customer. “If anyone is afraid to speak to a customer,” he writes, “you are doing the wrong things.”

• Stop minimizing the value of your customers. Stress their importance in meetings and internal communications.

• Strive to continuously improve the customer experience not just through service, but through the customer’s contact with everyone in your company.

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