Do customers want Social Customer Service? Yes, and they want more…

I receive Google Alerts on BigData in Healthcare as well as social customer service (these are aligned with my professional activities).

I received two alerts recently:

There are many more like this although I admit, the number of alerts I receive touting social customer service is much larger.

Here’s my thoughts. Customers want to get a job done. They often do not care how to get it done especially if its a negative or an operational issue, for example, an item they purchased is not working or they need to make a fix for a bad banking transaction quickly.

The customer’s job is: “fix or solve the issues.” This is why FTR – First Time Resolution–is the top customer service metric that customers want to experience. So for each customer service episode, again excluding “rage” issues, is “how do I get this done as fast or efficiently as possible?”

I am not sure that customers care if its tweets, facebook pages or the call center.

But today, social media channels, with their expectations of a fast response, often have a faster SLA for responding. Social channels cannot easily spike FTR, but they can get the customer engaged faster than say, a phone channel with an IVR navigation time of at least 5 minutes.

So customers gravitate to those channels that get them going as fast as possible and today, social channels have spiked some aspects of customer services–so yes, social customer service is relevant so long as it remains responsive. I think the second article in trying to make a point but the nuances matter here. It’s not that there is no proof customers want to use social customer service channels, its that they will use social customer service channels as long as companies are responsive in that channel.

And there are some interesting balancing forces that may sustain and grow channels such as twitter and facebook over the long run. Strategically, since there is an opportunity to engage customers directly in a public forum–and twitter and shown to be very effective at doing this–companies need to capitalize on these channels. Hence being part of the mix and engaging are additional  benefits for maintaining a social customer service channel presence.

I am not swayed by doe-eyed or save-the-world arguments when it comes to customer management. My perspective is that you need to invest in this channel and manage the balance with other investments.

If you need help finding the balance, give me call.

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