Social customer service: how to upgrade the humans who run the robots

Photo credit: Unsplash

Social customer service, customer service via social media, is often hailed as a silver bullet for today’s vocal online consumers. In this system, automated chat bots send out tweets or posts that connect customers with real service representatives.

The idea may seem simple, but as mobile internet usage booms in APAC, customer service needs to be pollinated throughout entire organisations in order to respond to the labyrinth of online feedback.

Millions of online conversations about your brand are happening right now. Public outbursts can be volatile, and brand safety has never been more of a concern. A digital customer service team, alone, won’t be able to scale fast enough to prevent and put out the fires unless customer experience is a central focus across all departments.

Particularly in mature enterprises, social departments must decentralize to respond to the online customer service ecosystem rapidly. Functions may be separated into: listening, routing feedback to appropriate departments, customer relations management, PR for escalations, employee education, and data and text analytics.

Make it everyone’s problem

Slow responses and being redirected to other channels are the definition of a negative customer experience. No one enjoys this. The key to connecting customers with the right answers, right now, is using an internal social tool that routes queries and problems to appropriate internal experts.

This could be engineers, customer service, public relations, sales, marketing, or IT, for example. Doing this requires a designated member of each department getting involved in the social customer service conversation.

30 percent of consumers would rather receive customer service on social media than contact a company by phone.

Social platform management tools allow company-wide customer service integration to be relatively inexpensive, and this integration is definitely worth the time invested.

Exceptional customer service has always been an overlooked revenue driver: acquiring a new customer is anywhere between five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. This retention drives profit while the positive brand awareness ushers in leads.

Further, by responding to customer issues via social media, a one to many channel, companies are able to deflect contact to more expensive channels such as phone or email. In fact, according to research by Nielson, “30 percent of consumers would rather receive customer service on social media than contact a company by phone.”

Open the floodgates

Seamless communication is all about putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes. For example, omni-channel service outlets make engagement easier: the faster someone can get in contact with a representative, the less likely they are to throw a tantrum on Twitter. We are in the “me first, me now” generation, and customers won’t hesitate to take to social media to share their experiences, whether positive or negative.

But we shouldn’t be using social media just to put out fires and rely solely on templated responses; we should be constantly listening to the social conversations to prevent them.

The beauty of social is the availability of a seamless channel to connect with existing customers. Think of the value of using data from social listening to constantly refine your campaign message, promotions, or even tailor-fit your product.

Keep your ear to the ground

Collapsing barriers to achieve agility