Transform Customer Experience by Isabella Villani

Author:Isabella Villani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-11-19T13:26:56+00:00

Social media

Channel strategy has seen a concerted push towards lower-cost channels. For example, when businesses improve the functionality of their websites, they can ease customers into transacting over the internet rather than using higher-cost channels such as bank branches and post offices. Efficiency is a key driver of online development for government agencies too as they try to stretch increasingly constrained budgets to provide the services citizens expect.

New channels will often take a while to pay off, but social media is a channel that has found rapid acceptance and has become an influential element in the market at many different levels. Businesses of all sizes are becoming involved in social media. In Australia, the 2018 Yellow survey found that 51 per cent of small businesses, 58 per cent of medium businesses and 85 per cent of large businesses had active social media presences.17 This represented a small increase of around 5 per cent for each category over the previous two years.

Large businesses were most active in using social media for two-way communication with customers, but the popularity of the channel was on the wane. The percentage of large businesses using social media platforms as a two-way communication channel was 95 per cent in 2017 but fell to 76 per cent in 2018. The involvement of small firms also fell from 58 to 51 per cent, while the proportion of medium-sized firms rose from 41 to 48 per cent.18

One conspicuous shift was that fewer large businesses were using their social media pages to encourage contributions such as online comments, ratings and reviews. Between 2017 and 2018, the percentage inviting feedback decreased from 92 to 76 per cent. In small and medium businesses, the proportion only changed marginally, with both reporting rates in the 50s. The practice of engaging with customers who provided feedback also declined substantially in large businesses, from 93 to 84 per cent, while it was constant among small businesses at 61 per cent and increased in medium businesses from 51 to 56 per cent.19

These figures indicate that people in organisations are beginning to realise that if you’re going to have a successful social media channel as one of your customer contact channels, the channel will need to be actively managed and supported.

Ian Bailey has spoken openly about the problematic impact of social media on business in his time as Kmart Australia’s managing director. Kmart, like most retailers, has had to deal with broad-based changes in customer service processes with the advent of social media, which has turned once-private complaint channels into public forums. ‘If we have an issue with a customer,’ Bailey says, ‘. . . we have to be instantaneous in our response. They no longer come at us with lawyers, they’re just blasting us all over social media, damaging the brand that way.’20

To fend off the worst problems, organisations of all sizes need a social media strategy, a budget, skilled people, sound processes and the right technology, which needs to be integrated in your technology stack.

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