There tends to be a lot of conversations of social media as an engagement tool, or social media as a sales tool, or using social media to drip-feed leads. What these all have in common is that the end objective is to drive sales.
But some companies are using social media for a different purpose – customer service. This post is going to look at why companies are using social media for customer service and a few companies who are doing a really good job. Let’s check it out.
Why companies love social media
First, let’s look at some numbers. Social Media Today produced a whitepaper on this topic with the extraordinarily dry name The Social Customer Service Index 2015. However, it’s actually an excellent whitepaper and well worth a read. But here are the highlights:
- 40% of the people they surveyed said that their companies were seeing very beneficial results from engaging with people on social media
- Over the past three years, companies have tripled the number of people involved in social support strategy
- For some, social media is increasingly the first point of contact, before (more expensive) traditional customer service channels
- Other important trends include one mentioned by Jay Baer who found that 42% of people expect a brand to respond on social media to a problem within 60 minutes.
All this paints a clear picture that (a) brands and companies are embracing social media for customer service, and are generally pretty happy with the results, and (b) a lot of people are happy to use social media get help when they have a problem.
So why might companies be excited about this?
What it really boils down to is that call centres are expensive and digital channels are not. That's it, in a nutshell.
When you go on Twitter and find the answer to your problem (because it’s been asked 19 times) and decide not to call the helpline, that’s a giant savings for the company. What’s more, whenever someone asks a question on social media, other people can read those answers. So there’s a reduced cost first in stopping the original call being made, and second from other people reading those answers and thus stopping subsequent calls. So cost reduction is a major factor for companies to get on board with social media customer service.
There are other benefits as well though. Namely, if you offer support on social media, you create a much more holistic approach to customer care. The idea being that your company is wherever your customer is, and is ready and waiting whenever they are. Given the heightened demands on companies to provide excellent customer service, it’s hardly surprising that the relative low cost of social media CS is a favourite.
What does this actually look like?
Case study: Nokia
In 2014, Martin Hill-Wilson had an interview with a social media executive at Nokia named Chris Geddes. Mr. Geddes said that for years he struggled to get social media taken seriously – until they started working with customer service.
Mr. Geddes organized all of the customer service channels from most expensive (phone) to least expensive, (web chat, social media, etc.). He implemented strategies to shift people off the expensive customer service platforms and onto the cheaper ones. For example, he added a button to the bottom of each FAQ that said “Thanks, now I don’t have to call the call centre.” When people clicked, he knew how much he was saving. That way, it was clear what questions were doing well to solve problems and what ones were doing badly.
Those sorts of innovations helped him drive people towards engaging online and with social media, and save on call centre costs.
Case study: Intercontinental Hotels Group
Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) has built social media into their customer service process to such an extent that increasingly it’s the first point of contact for a customer with a problem. But they’ve approached it in a slightly different way than Nokia did.
They view any contact with the customer as an opportunity for brand building, sales, and marketing, and so have focused on integrating social media marketing and social media customer service into one.
To get a little buzzword-y on you, they’re trying to build an omnichannel brand by uniting customer experiences behind the sales and marketing team. To that end, according to Nick Ayres, their global director of social marketing, they feel “‘customer service’ [is] really is an extension of, or an opportunity for, another marketing and sales channel”.
One point that we felt IHG hit on the head was that a lot of customer service (especially in hospitality, maybe less so in tech and other industries) is simply ensuring that people feel that their concerns are heard. For example, if someone stays in a hotel and the street is exceptionally noisy and they can’t sleep, they might leave a negative review on TripAdvisor. Realistically, they know that the hotel can’t really control how noise travels – they mostly just want the hotel to know that their stay was less than ideal. Simply engaging is usually enough to get someone to feel much better about the company and the brand, and IHG have embraced this wholeheartedly.
Wrap up
Social media has been heralded as everything from a waste of money and time to the best thing since infomercials figured out that shooting the befores in black and white made the afters look way better.
But in that time, there’s always been a struggle to fit it into a broader company context – what does it do, who owns it, and how do you track it? Even now, with a mountain of companies offering tracking and analytics services, it’s still very hard to discern what value there is in a community. Customer service is helping to bring some much-needed metrics to the business of social media. And of course, the flipside is that customers are getting ever-better service and improved abilities to help themselves, which really helps everyone.
With customer service, social media may have finally found a home.
