Picking up on my post from a few days back, eMarketer published some summary level information on a study done by the Society for New Communications Research. Essentially what the study revealed is that social media is becoming a pretty significant source of information on product quality and on the level of customer service provided for specific products and services

Or in other words, social media and the ease at which it facilitates individual publishing lets people complain globally as opposed to over the backyard fence. An Google facilitates the communication of those complaints to others…forever.

There is a huge lesson here that brand managers are only starting to learn. Customer service = brand when a online blog posting complaining about your service gets more traffic than your online advertising efforts.

For those who couldn’t attend the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco (myself included), many of the presentations have been posted on SlideShare.

My favorite of the bunch so far is Customer Service is the New Marketing which talks about the damage or value you can create to your brand based on the customer service you offer online and off (but these days more online than off). It also has great pictures.

The presentation references one of my all time favorite posts on TechCrunch called Comcast, Twitter and the Chicken which makes the point about how customer service is changing in the online world better than any diatribe on the topic from me.

The funny thing is that just this week I finally got an email back from customer service at Bosch in regard to a complaint I had about a dishwasher that I bought. Ignoring the nature of my complaint (a cheap plastic part on my high end dishwasher wore out almost immediately), the time line of their response is rather interesting.

Using a form on their website we requested help on April 12. They responded with a form letter that really didn’t help on April 16 and we immediately responded back re-iterating the issue again. The latest response showed up in my mailbox on April 21 and suggested I call them to order (and pay for I assume) a new part.

So here we have a company that spends a fortune advertising in magazines in an attempt to create a high end, exclusive brand who cannot find the time to respond to an email in under four days. Yet I bet if I call them I’ll get someone on the phone in under 5 minutes.

As more and more consumers move their entire lives online, companies that want to maintain their brands are going to have to examine whether the online experience they are offering their customers is really where it needs to be. Comcast responding to a Twitter post from a major blogger is one of the best examples of a company that at least, in theory, understands the changes that are underway. Bosch, an example of one that doesn’t.