The majority of businesses and brands are ignoring their customers in social media.

Recent surveys have shown that posts about customer service issues on Twitter and Facebook are often met with no response at all. Silence.

To your customers, that silence speaks volumes. Here’s what it tells them: 1) That you’re not listening 2) That their questions or problems aren’t very important 3) That you’re more interested in pumping out marketing messages in social media than actually helping your customers with their needs.

In actual fact, your reasons for not responding may stem from some very real internal business challenges around social customer care, such as identifying and training the right employees to engage with customers, scaling operations and resources to keep up with the rising number of posts, prioritizing messages that are truly actionable, and developing meaningful metrics that track the results of your social efforts against business goals.

But these justifications are mere background noise for your customers, who just want –and expect — their questions acknowledged and their problems solved. As Dave has blogged here in the past, “responding to customer posts … is now table stakes.”

Sometimes, the disparate priorities between the marketing and customer service departments can slow down or kill your response times, too. But put yourself in the shoes of the customer whose question to your brand’s Facebook Wall goes unanswered for days, even as new status updates about upcoming sales and special events continue to appear. No amount of explaining that “marketing controls the Facebook page, and only handles outbound postings” will satisfy.

With 2012 now in full swing, there’s no better time for the members of your social team — no matter where they sit in the organization — to come together and build out a workflow that ensures your fans, customers, and advocates are listened to, and then actually answered when they reach out to you with a problem.

Start with the people who love coming to work each day, who can articulate your brand values, and understand how your business makes its money.

When putting your initial team in place, understand that you’re creating public-facing Brand Advocates for your company. The people in this role are directly influencing your company’s perception not only with the one person that they are responding to, but potentially with tens, hundreds, or even thousands or more of that customer’s followers, friends and family.

On the social web, your representatives will respond publicly: This means they directly influence perceptions of “the masses”, not only the one person who posted a comment.  When you add the ease (and even expectation) of reforwarding, retweeting and linking content, the response your social media representative generates has more power than just one interaction. “Word of mouth” in social media is taken to exponentially higher levels than ever before. Therefore, you must inherently trust that the decisions your social representatives make are the right ones for your company’s brand in marketplace. So, start with the people you already have that understand the risks and rewards on serving on the social front lines.

Tap internal subject matter experts who positively influence the external customer experience.

While decision and filtering engines help direct specific inquiries to specialized representatives, it is important to have social media representatives who know (or can quickly find) relevant information and respond in a customer-centric manner to customers. In most social media interactions, the person who posted expects a response from your company, even when they were “just talking” about your company. Social media is a critical customer touch point which requires a correct content response and a properly positioned response – both are essential, since the social media representative is essentially taking your company into the conversation.

The potential opportunities for delighting customers in social interactions are enormous. You need social media representatives who can strategically understand this power, and then take tactical actions to fully leverage internal options to maximize customer satisfaction.

Choose problem solvers with outstanding interpersonal and writing skills. 

Although the social media channel is a new and emerging response channel, many of the traditional customer service skills apply. Solving customer problems efficiently and responding effectively is still the name of the game. Because of the nature of social media, it is imperative that written responses are impactful, professional and can pass the test of, “Is this response something I would approve of hundreds of people seeing?” Evaluating an applicant’s writing skills is strongly encouraged prior to hiring for asocial media position.

While social media is known for its use of acronyms and spelling shortcuts, an appropriate command of spelling and grammar is a non-negotiable expectation. The image of your company is on the line with every social media response generated. And once a response is sent, it often will take on a life of its own. While a poorly crafted, unprofessional response to a customer that is posted publicly can really hurt your company’s image, few things can benefit your company more than an outstanding, professional customer experience with your company for everyone to see.

Find multi-taskers who can handle the details yet understand the big picture and want to improve your company.

Like traditional customer service efforts, you need social media representatives who are highly efficient and can do more than one thing at a time. There will be multiple posts coming in, and the need to act quickly to provide an effective response to each post may require some real mental gymnastics. Social media representatives are often involved in ongoing conversations with more than one customer at a time: Being detail-oriented and organized enough to keep everything straight is a great attribute to look for in this type of agent.

Along with detail, the social agent often needs to assess emerging trends and discover how seemingly disparate issues “fit together” into a bigger picture. People who can naturally identify root causes then help drive improvements through the organization can be game changers for you.

Remember, your social media representatives are on the front line hearing directly from customers in “real time” scenarios. Unlike traditional customer service, the customer hasn’t called your company (yet); instead, they’re just talking about it, in public with their friends and followers. Social media can therefore provide a viewpoint which is “ahead of the curve”, which gives your company valuable data to be acted upon which may potentially provide “fixes” before a problem reaches critical mass. Having front line employees who understand this dynamic and are able to shape customer comments into improvements for your company is part of the payoff.

To recap, the ideal Social Media Representative should be a(n):

• Brand Advocate – they must love your company and act as an extension of your brand
• Very customer-centric thinker who automatically puts himself or herself in the customer’s shoes
• Subject matter expert on company policies and procedures – or can quickly find the answer
• Strong problem solver with solid decision making skills
• Outstanding written communicator, including grammar/editing
• Multi-tasker who enjoys the challenge of handling more than one thing at a time
• Organized thinker who is detail oriented
• Strategic thinker who can understand the power of social media and help continually improve your company

Look back at that list: and to think that you thought social media itself was difficult! Finding someone—let alone a team—that fits this description may be hard. But these people are out there, and most likely are in your organization now. Find them, develop them, and build social capabilities into your customer care organization. Your customers will thank you, in public.

Enter the rise of social media and the uberconnected customer. The reality of social technologies is that customers are moving at a much faster pace than companies. They expect responsive resolution of their concerns whenever and wherever they are. The combination of mobile devices and social media are finding many businesses unable to cope. In an age when kindergarteners are learning on iPads not chalkboards, even the biggest brands can quickly lose ground if they don’t understand social customer support.

I’ve highlighted three areas that are commonly overlooked in a company’s move to social customer service.

1) The sheer scale of interactions:  In our 24/7 smartphone world, more and more customers talk about brands on devices that are easier and easier to use. It’s easy to say “I’m at Starbucks, here’s what’s going on,” but it’s just as easy to say “here’s what’s going wrong at Starbucks right now.” In seconds I can point my phone at something and show people what I’m seeing. Even Consumer Reports has recently recommended that if you have a complaint, go online! The result for customer service is that the number of interactions is skyrocketing. If your Customer Service group is beginning to integrate social interactions, get serious about tools and processes that are specifically designed for scale. The social channel is not just about replacing a percentage of phone calls – it’s about engaging customers in a persistent conversation about things that brands must deal with overall. And it’s happening at a pace that is catching a lot of people by surprise.

2) Reversing the flow of information:  It’s been said a thousand times that the consumer is now in control — but what does that actually mean to Customer Support?  Let’s break it down. Customer support is built upon knowledge and conversations. As much as 70 percent of the content about a given brand on the public web is now user-generated.  (IBM Forward View, 2011.)  Face it – fewer of your customers are relying on your website for their purchasing data.  Fewer are influenced by your ads or the zillion dollars you’ve spent through the years on carefully crafted messages and positioning statements. If you’re looking for a more connected way of doing business, reverse the flow of information. Encourage employees and customers to be active participants in the content creation process.  Empower your Service agents to start using more feedback from the web instead of relying on traditional sources of information.  Knowledge articles and information are most effective when they’re freshly contextualized for the customer’s issue and tuned to their past behavior, and even more powerful when they’re proactive.  And that means more real-time exchange with customers. If you are seen by customers as a relevant peer, you have the opportunity to correct misperceptions and supplement information in real time. So instead of waiting to react to a customer’s complaint, armed with traditional knowledge articles and canned responses, today’s leading social customer support organizations are entering two-way conversations in social networking sites, forums and support communities. With 20% of social interactions today being about brands and products, any Customer Care organization who ignores this will be at risk, or seen as just plain irrelevant.

3) Responding to the change in expectations:  Social media is bringing about some not-so-subtle changes in what your customers are expecting (and will expect) of you. Real-time conversations on the social web are shrinking response time expectations, and this can hurt a brand that is slow to respond. But it’s not just about speed – customer expectations of how well they’ve been treated, and whether they’re being served in the channels they prefer, have been forever altered by great experiences offered by a few early pioneers of social customer service. The implication is that great service delivered by one brand sets the expectation for great service from all brands. Think about it — if you have a wonderful experience with an airline, for example – a coveted aisle seat has been remembered, or they’ve gone the extra mile to help with lost luggage — you now begin to expect and even demand a better experience from all your brands.  So when companies consider how well they’re doing in engaging customers in social media, instead of asking how efficient their responses to social media mentions are, perhaps they might want to ask themselves – how fast are our competitors responding?

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.

1. Change happens when the change can add value to all parties involved.
2. Change happens when new technology enables change.
3. Change happens when new generations (customers) just think different.

Add Value to All:
Social done right in customer service can add value to everyone involved. For the company it can reduce service costs by solving problems fast and therefore reducing calls into the customer service team. It can improve speed of change for the company by listening to customers and getting the first mover information to places in the organization where it is needed.  Most important it can drive loyalty and revenue by listening and responding to what customer want and what they are willing to pay for.  These happy customers buy more and also tell their friends who also buy more.  All of these events increase the brand value of the company.

New Technology:
I hate to say it, because I was around in the beginning of customer service systems, but customer service, as we know it today is broken.  It looks more like mainframes than agile apps that can move at the speed of business innovation today.  Big box systems (ACD’s, IVR’s), multiple 800 numbers to call to get bad service from people who know less than you do about items you purchased from their company.  Email that is rarely answered and if it is answered it is a form letter and it tells you to call into the bank of 800 numbers.  There are some companies working hard to leverage this old technology that are doing this right but it is taking an army of people and the company is spending millions on people, millions on systems and millions on maintenance to keep these old technologies limping along.  It is time to bring new technology to companies so they can interact with customers in new ways that leverage all the great innovation that has come about over the last few years.

New Customers:
The most important aspect effecting the changes coming to customer service by social is the fact that this is how the customers (remember the people with the money that companies are trying to serve) want and demand to interact with companies.  I am not saying 800 numbers, email and self-service are going to be 100% replaced, but I am saying that there is a new starting point for true conversations with customers and that is social.  Yes, it is early and tools are just coming to the market that are built for enterprise scale use but companies need to form the correct teams, understand what is out there and jump into this shift with both feet.  The executives need to understand it, the VP’s need to embrace this change and top talent at the director and manager level need to be empowered to test, try and learn.  This cannot be a new task thrown on top of their overflowing plates.  This needs to be the full-time job of people that understand customer service and open to new ways to interact with their market.  These people need to be open to new ways of working, listening and having conversations with customers.  This requires new thinking in service, sales, marketing, operations, technology, legal and human resources.  The tools to start solving this problem are here and better tools are coming.  The long pole in the tent to embrace this shift has nothing to do with the tools it has to do with companies and leaders that do not understand.  I have had the privilege to see first hand top companies embrace this shift and I have seen other top brands stick their head in the sand and hope this fad will pass.  I am not saying that if a company truly embraces social they will win.  Obviously the company has to have good products and services and they have to deliver on their promise.  But show me two companies with similar products and services in a market where differentiation is limited (this is just about everyone) and the growth company will be the company that leads in this social shift.

NOTE TO COMPANIES:  Consumer tools are enabling unhappy customers to revolt…listen to them, react to them and simply have conversations with them and you will win them over assuming to deliver on your companies promise.  The companies that get this right will be the market share leaders and those that don’t will lose significant market share over the next three years.

This is not just about unhappy customers – more and more happy customers that are delighted are posting positive things to their friends and network about a great company, a great service or a new surprising positive conversation they had with a company they did not think they liked but now they love.

Here are a couple key stats that signal this shift.  More and more people are using their real name on Twitter.  People are also turning on geo-location on their smart phone.  Consumers want you to know who they are and where they are…are you able to have a conversation with the consumers that matter to you?

Consumers are smart, they know companies can listen if they want to and the companies that start to have social conversations with their customers will win!

I was in the middle of contact centers and customer service for the last 20 years.  The next ten years will bring the greatest change we have ever seen.

Ironically, we do this well as families or other small, self organizing groups, but seem rarely able to do it from within large bureaucracies . Customer service is an excellent example of this. Companies, which are groups of humans, are able to quickly detect patterns of dissatisfaction in their customer base. Instead of addressing the concerns with adaptive solutions for specific UNIQUE customer groups, they force all customers, regardless of their concern, to run a maze of rigid (and often non-sensical) processes. The customer inevitably becomes dissatisfied because they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, had no voice, or otherwise suffered great angst in the process. At least that’s been the status quo until the rise of social businesses.

Today, companies are learning the hard way that customer service is not ‘one size fits all’. Customers want to be involved in the resolution process and, at a minimum, be continually informed. When they are not, they broadcast their displeasure across the social web, exposing both the process and the outcome to thousands of their followers. Companies that understand this and redefine how customer service is delivered realize both cost savings in deflected calls as well as increased customer loyalty and revenue. These companies have not tossed out their processes and procedures with reckless abandon. Instead they have leveraged the terabytes of information within and without their walls, in a model that trains the customer to repeatedly experience them as a source of satisfaction. The customer and company join in a symbiosis to solve the concern, and most importantly, the customer feels met, as a distinct human. They remember this experience more than anything, and the company that provided that feeling will become a place to whom the customer returns again and again.

Take the social web apart and it’s pretty simple: Your customers see your ads, and as a result they form an expectation as to what your product or service will do for them. This is an expectation that you have set. If the expectation seems promising—if your product is appealing, for example, then they’ll try it. What they experience when they do will create a reaction, and that reaction will get talked about. In other words, you made a promise and you either kept it, or you didn’t. So if you’re truly worried about what people are going to say, the place to start isn’t trying to figure out how to control what your customers are saying: Instead, it’s how to control what they are experiencing. You have complete control over your product or service experience.

Want an example? Head over to Starbucks. Five years ago, give or take, the brand was in trouble. CEO Howard Schultz put it bluntly: “We’ve lost our way.” But then the team—led by their CEO—did something truly remarkable: They turned to their customers, and asked for their help. The firm also shut itself down—for three hours—and retrained every single Barista on the proper preparation and delivery of its core product: An exceptional cup coffee. Starbucks took suggestions from its customers—80,000 suggestions and counting. Over the two years that followed the firm implemented 100 of them, after extensive public discussion. Do the math: 100 ideas implemented in two years is, on average, one new customer-driven innovation showing up at the retail store every week. For two years. ROI? I’m glad you asked: Take a look at SBUX from 2008 to 2011 and compare it with any other similar brand or the overall market index.

The next time you find yourself in the middle of a social panic attack, take a deep breath: You have complete control over the causes of the conversations. And if you can control the things that cause people to talk, you can control what they talk about.

That may be an exaggeration, but a lot of customers with ideas they’d readily share end up feeling like that. Those are ideas lost, and relationships that could power your business…lost. OK, so let’s evolve our fictitious company, and imagine that the Product Manager actually noted enthusiastically each customer’s suggestion. Would your Product Manager then know what to do next? Would this person have the visibility across the rest of the organization to act on that customer feedback?

Active listening is a long-standing social media marketing “best practice” – and note here that “active” means “hearing, understanding and responding.” But our Product Manager faces a bigger challenge: rather than, say, explaining why a policy is written the way it is, and offering some kind of “extra” to genuinely satisfy (for now…) a great customer, our Product Manager is being asked to change the wheels on the bus while the bus is still moving. That’s harder.

Social media—often undertaken in Marketing—is quickly moving across the entire organization. Responding to customer posts—daunting as that may seem—is now table-stakes. The fact that most companies claim to be “using social media” while upwards of three-quarters of customer requests for service on the social web go unanswered points to the growing gap between social media as a marketing channel and your customer’s expectation—right or wrong—that you are capable and willing to address their service issue on the social web.

Social customer care goes beyond Marketing: It’s HR, where hiring decisions and employee policies are set (like talking about the company on Twitter at home.) It’s Legal, whose job it is to understand what is being said, and to ensure that training (back to HR) is in place. It’s Operations, where customer care agents and ordinary employees are trained and empowered to respond when appropriate. And it’s the C-suite, where executive strategies and quantitatively assessed business objectives are built on social technology and collaboration.

Stop and ask yourself — If your customer said something, would you hear it? If you heard it, could you act on it? And if you opened your doors, would your entire organization be prepared to collaborate and take your company where your customers wanted it to go? As you develop your plan for the “social future” ask yourself: “How many of our offices have a view of the customer, and how many have an outside entrance that says “Welcome.”

The real game, however, is under the surface. You can point your biggest guns at the tips of the icebergs and fire away…with relatively little impact on the formation of the next ones. Like icebergs, the conversations just keep coming. It’s time for a different game plan.

Enter Customer Care. If you think of the conversations on the social web as the artifacts of a customer’s experience, then customer care is a driver. The conversation is rarely—Superbowl spots aside—actually about the ad. The conversation is about two things: 1) What happened when your customer used your product, and 2) What happened when your customer asked you for help? The first is in the hands of your Product Managers and operations teams. The second is the responsibility of your customer care team.

Here’s the rub: All of the social media software available now has been developed to meet the needs of marketers, who by and large are interested in aggregate trends, overall sentiment and anecdotal posts. For brands lucky enough to have only low volumes of social conversations – tens or hundreds of posts daily—some of the existing solutions provide a limited ability to respond to posts. But take a look at a modern call center: AT&T for example has 65,000 agents spread around the globe. Now imagine the software that’s actually needed if that call center were to transform itself into a social care center.

Hang on, because that’s where things are headed. Your ability to manage tens of thousands of conversations, to create advocates rather than settling for “issue resolution” will become the defining factor deciding the winners from also-rans as global markets get connected. IDC estimates that about 1 billion new smartphones will ship in 2015, double the amount in 2011. Is your customer service team ready for that kind of customer connectivity to the social web? Now is a great time to ask that question.