"Social" Customer Service
I've heard a new term coined that I think will catch on...social customer service. It's the practice of using social media for customer service purposes. But I've always thought customer service is supposed to have a social aspect to it if it's going to be useful. To me, social media is just another platform that companies can use to connect with customers. It shouldn't be considered separate from "regular" customer service.
In today's issue of 1to1 Weekly, Jeremy Nedelka speaks with Datamonitor analyst Ian Jacobs about how social media should be incorporated into the larger customer service arena. For Jacobs, the problem is scalability and process, not the act itself.
I think that companies need to consider social media for what it is -- a personal connect with one or many people. Adding process and other corporate restrictions to its use will ruin it. Let CSRs use it if they are comfortable with it, and make sure they add the insight they gain to customer records. That's it. It's supposed to be free-flowing and unrestricted.
Do you have any experience incorporating social media into your customer service? How is it going?
Related Entries
- Guest Blogger Joseph Jaffe: It's Better to Be S.A.F.E. Than Sorry
- Hoffman's Hot Seat: The Chief Customer Officer: Building a Customer Strategy
- Starting Out in Social Media
We (and some of our customers) have been calling the process where consumers solve product problems together- "Social Solving." If organizations are going to have the service organization involved in social media then there are a few things they need...BTW we believe that service people have a lot of the right skills to participate in social media based discussions with customers as they are constantly formulating answers to end customers, are "online" all day and know a lot about product and service issues....
First, they need the ability to leverage all of the amazing expertise of consumers online in their own service process. Second they need to be alerted as to when discussions are taking place online about your products/brand - otherwise they will be full time scouring the web. We have started to use our ability to harvest internet data and drive actions into a response /review queue to enable just these two things....pretty neat stuff!
One thing we've noticed as we've discussed social media with our clients is that some still think they have a choice in the matter, when in fact that's no longer the case. Businesses may decide not to leverage these platforms and tools, but that doesn't mean their customers aren't out there discussing it. And that can be very dangerous. You need to be out there taking advantage of social media, but at the very least, you should be out there to understand just what the conversations are that might be affecting your business.