The ubiquity of social customer service is upon us. According to recent research from Forrester Consulting commissioned by Conversocial, the number of customers using Twitter for customer service has doubled from 11% to 22%.

Customer service is undergoing a major revolution, where we see online communication shifting away from private, one-to-one channels to public, one-to-many channels that are mobile, social and attached to real identity. With the rapidly evolving shift in how we communicate and connect with each other, comes the need for companies to rethink how they interact with customers. In the midst of this maturation, it’s comforting to know that the core principles of great customer service still apply to social media. Social customer service is rapidly becoming the new, critical channel to drive satisfaction and loyalty.

Path to Best-In-Class

The social customer service journey of organisations can be broken down into three stages, from simply redirecting customers off social media and back to traditional service channels, through to a small team of social agents helping customers in an ad hoc way, and finally to a fully-resourced team, integrated into contact center processes, analytics and technology. For Conversocial, the key to the customer journey of social maturity is properly integrating social into the contact center.

At the most rudimentary level of social customer service, social media is used solely as a channel for outbound publishing and promotion. Customer service issues are either ignored or deflected off social to traditional channels such as phone and email. As a result of this, companies at this stage fail to use social as a customer service channel and thus fail to meet customer expectations or leverage the efficiency gains of service over social.

In the second stage, companies — often beginning with the Marketing Department — recognise that they need to have some sort of a social customer service presence. These organisations adopt a social customer service strategy in an effort to improve their engagement over social, usually achieved through working with the Customer Service Department.

While companies in stage two are helping some customers over social media, basic coverage means response times are usually slower than consumers expect. Additionally, the lack of information on agent and team performance makes efficient resourcing impossible, prevents the ability to integrate with CRM and business intelligence systems and impedes the operation from being able to effectively scale.

This is why it is imperative for companies to elevate to the third stage, where the contact center is given responsibility for managing, training and resourcing the social customer service operation. At this stage, businesses as a whole recognise that social media is a primary customer service channel, alongside phone, email and chat. Precise metrics are used to ensure social customer service teams are delivering the experience customers expect, and are resourcing their agent effectively. These enable companies to efficiently train and manage a wider pool of agents, who usually focus exclusively on social media (either completely, or within any one particular shift). Most importantly, customers are receiving excellent customer service over social media.

Challenges of Social Customer Service

While the maturation of social media brings numerous opportunities in social customer service, it also poses many new challenges for brands. These include:

· Noise: Unlike other channels, agents must sift through a lot of content to identify customer service issues on social

· Unorganised: Multiple public and private messages from a single customer are hard to track and can get lost between agents

· Slow processes: Lack of efficient approval workflows means slow, rigid and manual process with extra complexity when resolving an issue that requires involvement from other departments

· High stakes: A single error can result in a full-blown social media crisis

Future of Social Customer Service

So how will social media continue to evolve and mature in the future? The traditional channels that customers use to engage with companies have the potential to be completely separate from real identity, and to be unconnected with each other. Customers have multiple email addresses, called whatever they want. IP address can change depending on where they are logging in. They can phone from work, from home, or from their cell. Because of these challenges, companies have been struggling with creating a ‘single view of the customer’ for decades.

Customer service is becoming a way of connecting with customers in real-time, wherever they are and on any channel, with complete awareness and personalisation. Done properly, this gives customer service the opportunity to build brand advocacy, drive revenue through both increased sales and reduced customer attrition, and massively increase customer insight.

Despite all these changes, the core principles of great customer service always apply. Social customer service comes into its own when meaningful, two-way dialogue takes place between companies and their customers. With brands clamoring for market share in saturated, consumer-driven markets, delivering great service in public arenas like Facebook and Twitter offers a clear differentiator to build a competitive advantage.

 

By Paul Johns, Chief Marketing Officer at Conversocial. 

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