If you are deciding whether your organization should have a presence on social media or not - you are living in a bygone era. Today Facebook has already crossed the 500 million active users mark and 50% active users log on every day. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook has been named as the Time Magazine person of the year 2010 for "Changing your communications". Twitter has more than 105 million users who send out more than 55 million tweets in a day. In today's parlance, these are not companies, these are countries. Today we only talk about the extent of your involvement in the social network and how your organization is influencing and getting influenced by the cyber-citizen.
Many leading companies are discovering the strategic business value of this new channel and are making comprehensive plans to proactively engage this digital consumer. They are discovering new ways to influence, new methods to interact and creative channels to serve this consumer.
Culture shock for customer service: For serving the digital consumer, almost all enterprises still rely on the IVR and email. These channels are good for the company to do analytics but lack the personal touch and more often than not the caller has to reach out to the customer service executive for resolution of issues. This results in a lose-lose situation wherein the customer is frustrated to get the right service and the organization suffers from high cost of customer service.
Many organizations have started using web collaboration for the purpose but few are using the social media channels for support provisioning. But organizations are in for a rude shock considering the fact that the "always-on" and aware digital-consumer would propagate the state of your customer service through the social medium. This could cascade into a downward spiral for brand image. On the bright side, social media can turn a single happy customer story to international news.
Consider the case of Best Buy - they were one of the early starters in the social media space; actively participating on Twitter - launching the "Twelpforce" program in 2009 alongside multiple customer service tools, parallel phone lines etc. The program received great customer response and the brand image of Best Buy was strengthened. Many other brands are also used Twitter to actively engage with customers, using a model most famously pioneered by Comcast. In early 2008, Comcast began searching Twitter to find disgruntled and troubled customers in a hope to pacify them. Their effort also resulted in great success and boosted their image through word-of-mouth. Today companies such as Zappos, SouthWest Airlines, JetBlue and Dell in the US are leading the way along with companies like BT, The Carphone Warehouse, ASOS, EasyJet, Virgin Trains etc in the UK.
A Win-win situation: Using social media to deliver customer service has cost benefits as well because here customers reach out to peers to solve product-related problems. Companies could use the power-of-the-crowd as people out there would be more than happy to assist others and the trust level for solutions from peers tends to be higher. Businesses would have to create and nurture communities; providing a platform for collaboration wherein they can monitor the posts and deal with customer complaints efficiently and effectively. Not only would this save companies time and energy, but it reduces the overhead of additional customer service staff. Rather than trying to sweep the unhappy customers under the rug, companies should look at them as a challenge and an opportunity to improve their brand.
Those who are early into the game of providing customer service on social media are doing it in the following manner:
- Using already established networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc as listening platforms. You can also have mediators on these public platforms who can respond for you, if required. Monitoring social conversations on these platforms can give your enterprise can get an early warning about any forth coming customer service issue.
- Establishing online customer communities or forums where customers, prospects, influencers and other enthusiasts can interact and share experiences regarding your products and services. These can be moderated or free-flowing depending on the requirement.
Integrating social media conversations with the enterprise customer support application for rendering customer support via social media. 
One size doesn't fit all: A word of caution would be in order here. Companies need to understand that customer service through social media might not be the right solution for every business. One needs to honestly judge the requirements and then implement a solution. But in order to stay competitive and effectively leverage the changing behavior of the digital consumer, one needs to think beyond traditional mechanisms and reach out to the customer in their channel-of-choice. Social media has done exactly that, by providing a voice to your customer and a channel to reach out to you. Now, it your choice to listen to them.
In the next post, we will talk about some best practices that companies are following when delivering customer service through social networks.
