March 10, 2016
It’s true! Social doesn’t increase your volume stack. Businesses who are yet to embrace social are still being complained to. The consumer picks up the phone and gifts you their feedback. They may also share an email with senior management AND then, they will go onto social to bemoan your businesses dated approach to customer services.
We all complain at some point. In life, some products are (unfortunately) faulty. Service offerings occasionally fail – we’re human after all. Issues arise. That is everyday life.
What defines your brand in the eyes of a customer or consumer, is how you respond to valid and warranted criticism. Do you embrace the gift that is feedback, recognising trends that impact your customers positively or negatively?
Some brands are fearful of customer services through social channels as they wrongly believe workloads will increase. Whereas reality is, your call volume will decline. The same volume of work, but through different channels.
Whether you’re a social advocate or not, you absolutely should be driving your business towards social customer service. The prime reason being, it’s where customers will have conversations with or without you.
Imagine this: customers bemoaning your dated approach to customer care; claiming you’re not listening to them, and worse, not (visibly) addressing their valid concerns or issues.
Versus this: customers bemoaning your dated approach to customer care; claiming you’re not listening to them, and worse, not (visibly) addressing their valid concerns or issues. But then, they receive a note saying: Your experience clearly isn’t up to our usual standard. We want to do something about this for you. Could we have your order number please?
Then, as long as you do something about the issue, (and in a timely fashion). You’re likely to see messages such as: “Thanks for sorting this so quickly. AMAZING customer service!”
Admittedly, these are likely messages that are shared on the phone with your better customer service people. Here’s the thing though, verbal messages don’t help you with your customer / consumer advocacy.
Social customer services should not be viewed with fear. You should embrace it! Deploy your excellent customer care skills through the most visible channel. Customers realise mistakes and errors happen. We all do. We just require visible and swift resolution when it happens. Social Media then broadcasts your excellent customer service, customer advocacy and customer loyalty messages to the wider world.
Clearly enabling social customer care isn’t as straightforward as ‘start tweeting or updating’.
There are key steps that need to be taken:
► Who is writing your social strategy?
► Who in your customer service team will become your social care experts?
► What training is required to ensure social excellence?
► What tools should you use to track complaints, engage with your social platforms and evidence benchmarks and successes?
► How will you integrate with marketing to incorporate brand activities and campaigns?
► How do you use data to map when your care team should be active? Are those times different to your current call hours?
► How do you flex staffing levels for peak periods?
Your journey to social excellence and evidencing to the wider world how you delight your customers all starts with making the decision to embrace social customer care. Digital transformation can be daunting, put having the right partners and knowledge on hand, will make the whole process much easier.