You Have the Staff for Social Customer Engagement
Customers are looking for service and information online, that's a given. Companies' response plans...that's often unknown. Organizations are responding to customers' complaints and inquiries in myriad ways, including hiring interns or agencies, creating a social taskforce, or taking an ad hoc approach where they may have marketing or customer service staffers track online interactions as their schedules allow.
According to RightNow Technologies CMO Jason Mittelstaedt, what companies need to do instead is operationalize social engagement. "It's not about monitoring comments," he said when we discussed the topic at the Forrester's Customer Experience Forum 2011. "It's about building customer engagement." And customer engagement, he said, doesn't happen haphazardly. It takes customer experience excellence based on such elements as responsiveness, escalation processes, and issue resolution.
Additionally, organizations need to appoint veterans in service delivery to interact with customers online, not just provide special training on social interactions, Mittelstaedt said, noting that many agents are under 30, so they usually know online etiquette well. "Companies don't need a social taskforce," he added. "They have people on staff already trained on and skilled in delivering customer service -- in their contact center."
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