For years it was commonly assumed that Marketing owned the love comments about a company, and Customer Service owned the hate comments. But leaders in Customer Service today are fast recognizing the need for change. They’re now asking questions such as — what are we doing today to drive customers up the brand advocacy ladder or moving them toward evangelism because of a wonderful customer service experience?
The notion that social media is just a replacement to the 1800 number when you have a complaint is overlooking one of this generation’s most important new enablers for connecting to customers and creating new revenue streams.
It’s true that cost reduction has been the lure of many initiatives in social customer support to date as seen in early social leader Best Buy’s $5M savings in 2010 via call deflections through 100,000 social interactions with their customers. Channels such as Twitter and Facebook represent a much lower cost alternative for many aspects of customer support, avoiding more expensive customer phone calls in an efficient way. (This is particularly attractive for consumer brands where the proliferation of mobile devices is now exploding the number of interactions with customers, a constant and very real threat to margins.)
It would be easy to limit one’s focus to cost reduction alone. However, one of the most powerful differentiators for companies today is even more effective in driving top line growth – and that is the proactive use of social media to drive relationships, recommendations, and influential champions for your brand. The Marketing team’s charter, you say? Think again.
Social media is becoming essential in today’s contact center. According to a recent study, 74 percent of consumers say their decisions to purchase from a company are influenced by what others say online. 72 percent of those surveyed said they have used social media to research the reputation of a company in terms of customer care prior to a purchase. Today’s leaders in Customer support are beginning to ask the next level of questions – what will it take to understand how customers perceive our business and what might we need to change? What are the factors for why someone would want to champion our brand? How do we encourage feedback through an ongoing, two-way conversation, to better understanding what turns off detractors and what makes promoters rave about us?
The Social Dynamx blog in the coming weeks will focus on many of these issues going forward. This is a breakout age for customer support – a time which begs for a redefinition of what it means to serve our customers. It should be a time of reinvention for process and tools and metrics that go beyond familiar measures for Customer care, with an end in mind that includes not just the resolution of an issue, but a sense of delight that drives future purchases and the amplification of satisfaction through a larger network.
This is a time when your customer support agents can become the new rock stars. When through embracing social media you can better understand what your customers need, serve them where they want to be served, how they want to be served – and send them away as budding advocates for your products and services. This is the role of the next generation contact center.
