Customer service has taken on a more strategic role in business in the last five years. But an interesting paradox is at work – as contact centers become more sophisticated, consumers have actually grown more frustrated and dissatisfied with the service they’ve received.
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?
