It’s fair to say that most of the marketing buzz written about social media tends to be about the proactive brand opportunities available.
However more businesses and organisations are starting to realise the effect that social media has on their customer service, and that sometimes they are ill-prepared to manage the range of comments and enquiries that the channels can attract.
Facebook and Twitter in particular are now used by customers to make complaints, give positive feedback and make enquiries about products and services. This new customer service environment is a double edged sword for customer managers.
Social media opportunities are about more than marketing – they are also being used as customer services tools by the general public
On one hand, the fact that many customer service operations and complaints have a strong online visibility on brand social media profiles hardly comes as welcome news for poorly performing organisations. But this new era of openness and transparency social media is a great opportunity for forward-thinking customer services teams to build loyalty by serving their customers.
Why social customer services?
Who can blame customers for posting complaints and enquiries on social media channels? For years organisations and businesses have made it very difficult for people to contact them.
Some organisations take this to extremes by refusing to display any contact information including telephone number or email address, presumably because they don’t want to interact with the general public. Faced with organisations who treat their contact information like a state secret, customers will understandably go straight to their Facebook Pages and post the issue there.
A quick look at Royal Mail’s website gives an insight into the problem. Their website goes to extraordinary lengths to hide its contact information.
Instead of having an email address or a telephone number, Royal Mail proudly feature a customer service Avatar called ‘Sarah’ - who sadly, doesn’t seem to be that helpful.
Faced with a lack of information, disgruntled customers usually head straight to the company’s Facebook Page. Royal Mail ingeniously get round this problem by creating a very poor Facebook presence which fails miserably to respond to customer complaints.
And it gets worse - Royal Mail brand managers and legal team take note: You’ve failed to protect your brand online as some ‘Brandjackers’ have created rival Royal Mail Facebook Pages. Google search ‘Royal Mail Facebook’ and you’ll see what I mean!
It certainly makes for an interesting read - the fake ‘royal mail’ Facebook page features posts from a diverse crowd – ranging from a guy in Essex who posts about being sacked by Royal Mail, to confused staff and lots of angry customers including a member of The Parachute Regiment photographed in Kandahar with a rifle who is going berserk about Royal Mail losing the birthday present he posted to his little son.
But it’s not all bad for Royal Mail. The company’s customer service interaction through its Twitter profile is actually quite good with lots of examples of Royal Mail helping solve customer issues and queries.
In fact, Twitter is an ideal social media channel for customer service as it allows for rapid responses and often one Tweet may be enough to help solve a minor customer service issue.
More and more businesses and organisations are starting to use Twitter, not just for brand promotion and broadcasting real-time updates, but also to responding in lightening quick time to customer queries.
Lessons for customer service
So organisations need to be prepared for comments and questions that people post to their Facebook Pages and Twitter Profiles. Part of the challenge for organisations is to understand that social media opportunities are about more than marketing – they are also being used as customer services tools by the general public.
If you are a large organisation then you also need to integrate customer service staff into your social media management along with PR and marketing. You should also have a scale of customer service issues that you can prepare responses for and, most of all, a system to respond quickly to customer comments on Facebook and Twitter.
Of course good customer service teams will not want to have a protracted conversation about a particular customer complaint online. Indeed half the battle from a customer service point of view will be to bring the complaint or query offline, hopefully solve the issue and bring it to a close.
