Businesses struggling to deliver natural, two-way communication with customers via social media already have the staff they need to cope, but the onus is typically on marketing or even IT teams to facilitate this vital channel.
Customer service and loyalty programmes are now more valuable to businesses than expensive marketing campaigns according to research from Amdocs. There is strong logic behind this thinking; customers are less loyal than they were two years ago while spiralling business costs are making it harder to justify extravagant advertising campaigns that carry no guarantee of success. In contrast, investment service and loyalty is easier to understand because it’s about protecting a tangible, already held asset: the customer. This is why 70 per cent of those polled say that loyalty is ‘critical’ for business growth - protecting what you have is the best platform to build upon.
Social media is another crucial, although less obvious, reason why the service department is becoming increasingly mission-critical for business health. Almost by default, the marketing department has taken the mantle of managing output through sites such as Twitter, and it shows. Social media by definition means interaction, two-way communication, but marketing professionals are conditioned to treat a ‘channel’ as a way to fire messages at prospects. This is why so many businesses, some very large, are using social media purely to spam sales messages at ‘customers’ and failing to respond to basic service requests.
The companies gaining value from social media are the ones who invest the time to interact with the people, embracing the values which have spurred spectacular growth of online communities. Customers, wary of the constant bombardment of corporate messages, increasingly shut out the spam (Google +, which allows users to filter out true friends/family from acquaintances and people they simply follows, is a good indicator of how the social media tools themselves are beginning to arm people with ways to filter the chaff from the wheat).
Therefore, businesses trying to engage web communities by simply SHOUTING AND REPEATING LOTS OF INFORMATION will fail, while those who allocate time to engage with their audience, gather feedback and fix service issues, will thrive. Achieving the latter, positive scenario is not easy because it requires input from people accustomed to thinking on their feet, balancing the need to maintain a consistent, professional tone while being informal and empathic enough to build meaningful relationships in a short timeframe.
It hardly needs stating at this point, but the best people for meeting the above criteria are our contact centre workers. Just as we encourage our front line workers to be ambassadors, reenforcing positive sentiments relating to our brand, while fixing problems before they cause customer loyalty to fail, we must take the next step and allow them to do what they do best on social media.
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