The Financial Times Guide to Social Media Strategy by Thomas Martin

Author:Thomas, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2018-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

* * *

EMBRACING SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

Why this matters

Social media has added a new dimension to the customer service function by providing a convenient and instantaneous way to complain, ask questions and occasionally praise. It has also encouraged a new type of customer behaviour in which people are increasingly likely to complain on Twitter or share a positive story on Facebook as they are to contact a call centre.86 The new reality is described perfectly by the comedian (and accidental social media commentator) Ricky Gervais: ‘Ten years ago, if something offended you, you’d get out a pen and paper and write “Dear BBC” and halfway through you’d go “Oh, I can’t being bothered. Now you can fire off a tweet to the director general of the BBC or the US President and they’ll probably tweet back. It’s a mad world!’87

We are currently in a transitional phase between old and new customer service. Some customers still prefer to use the telephone, email or even write letters of complaint, even if others have started to use social channels.88

Social media will become an increasingly important customer service channel, for the following reasons:

Customer preferences – it is far easier to tweet a question or complaint than go through the ‘call centre hell’ of multiple telephone options.

Customer experiences – the more people hear how tweeting a complaint or posting a question to a company’s Facebook page tends to receive a faster response than using traditional customer service channels, the more they will adopt this behaviour.

Cost factors – dealing with customer calls, emails and even the occasional letter from the more traditional customer is time-consuming and expensive. In contrast, it has been estimated that a trained customer service agent can deal with up to four social media queries in the same period of time that it takes them to deal with a single telephone call. Studies have also shown that the net promoter score (a critical metric for most customer service teams) is often higher for social than telephone-based channels – many people prefer the anonymity of a social media-based ‘conversation’ than the real thing with a call centre operative.

Emerging technology, and especially messaging apps such as WeChat and Facebook Messenger, will be used increasingly to handle customer service enquiries, especially now that so many of these enquiries are being made on smartphones, which are not the easiest way to use the ‘live chat’ function on most websites.89 Traditional customer service conversations using mobile phones also have a nasty habit of disconnecting just as you are getting to the important stuff. This is where the messaging apps come into their own, providing a discrete, personalised and super-efficient stream of two-way communication that can be interrupted without necessarily affecting the flow of the conversation. They will also take advantage of the evolution of chatbots or autobots to automate the handling of high volumes of conversations.90

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.