 Social media promises a revolution in customer service, as an efficient, inexpensive way to help customers online. But will it live up to the promise, asks Susannah Richardson, or will it be as ineffectual as email turned out to be?
Not so long ago, email promised a revolution in customer service: rather than calling, sitting in queues and getting frustrated, customers would be able to send an email and get on with their lives, while agents resolved queries in an efficient workflow.
Sadly, it never worked out that way. Too few companies geared up properly for email – their processes remained unchanged and their technology inadequate, so customer e-mails went unanswered. Customers soon realised this, stopped sending emails, and picked up the phone instead.
Fast forward 15 years and now social media is promising a revolution in customer service. While the danger is that it will meet the same fate as email, there is no reason for this to be the case. Social media can radically improve customer service and add to company profits – we just have to get it right. Here are four key dos and don’ts for making the most of the social revolution.
Do focus on resolution
The focus needs to be on resolution, not response. It is not enough to simply respond on social media. When they complain on social media customers want their issues resolved quickly.
Companies know this and they are keen to deliver it. Failure to respond adequately on social media can be devastating to reputationas BT discovered in December 2010 when it failed to resolve Lord Sugar’s problem with his router, or as Ryanair discovered in June this year when it tried to charge Lily Allen £40 to print her boarding pass.
Don’t succumb to fear and inaction
Companies want to embrace the potential of social media but they are worried about the cost. They fear that to bring social into the contact centre will involve them ripping out existing software and hardware and spending huge sums on replacements.
It is this that is causing the somewhat plodding response we are currently seeing from the call centre industry. We recently ran a poll which discovered that just 44% of companies have introduced social media handling into their customer service offering.
The remaining 56% are planning a strategy to monitor and respond to social media comments, but have yet to take the plunge.
 Do increase agent efficiency by 25%
It is possible to bring social media in alongside your existing telephony and CRM, to get a single view of customers across channels, to respond to them rapidly, and to do so through the most appropriate channel. Your agents need to be alerted to critical tweets and have all the information they need about the customer and the service issue to enable them to resolve it.
Ford Retail recently demonstrated how email can still be a viable customer service channel. The car dealership recently introduced a multi-channel contact and lead management system. The system queues enquiries from a range of channels and routes them to an appropriate agent, based on the time of day and how busy the agents are. A comprehensive database generates screen pops at suitable times in the conversation, giving agents the customer information they need at the precise time they need it.
The results have been startling: where some calls might have taken a minute to answer, now they are answered within 20 seconds, and the management team proudly talk of customers who have been taken aback by how quickly an agent has responded to their query. Indeed, the team at Ford Retail estimates that the introduction of this new system has increased agent efficiency by 25%.
Don’t delay
If Ford Retail can achieve all that using email, imagine how much more will be possible with social media. Customers are going to use social media whether we like it or not, and so we need to act now to ensure we are there, ready to respond and, crucially, to resolve their issues. As Ford Retail has demonstrated, this can be done with a minimum of disruption and cost. The successful contact centres of the future will be those that learn from this example, and act now to replicate it.
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