This is a guest post by Josh March, CEO of Conversocial.
Social media may seem like such a fully-ingrained part of our lives, but in reality we’re only hitting adolescence. Conversocial has worked with businesses since their first steps into social media engagement. At the time, this seemed revolutionary to most marketing departments – that customers would speak back, and that companies needed to do something about it. Over the past few years, we’ve come leaps and bounds and today social customer service is a standard concept, program and even team in many businesses.
But we’re still left with questions about what this really is. How will the contact center have to change, with customer support and engagement open to the public? Next week, I’ll be talking about “The Social Engagement Hub” alongside speakers from Edelman Digital, Ogilvy, GoDaddy and Nokia, and what this looks like for the future.
At Conversocial, we’ve worked with marketing, customer service, customer experience, customer insight, product, and sales teams, because social customer service calls for new rules of play for customer relationships. Social media presents opportunities for every part of your organisation – from customer retention in offering service to dissatisfied customers, to new sales from customers grumbling about your competitors. And the wealth of insight available in volunteered social data is wasted if your insight and product teams can’t action it to make better business decisions.
Developing great social customer service is the only way for companies to tap into this. We recently conducted research on the Twitter mentions of some of America’s biggestretailers. In a day in the life of Twitter, it’s astounding what’s out there for the taking. Major opportunities raised by customers constituted over 1/3 of all mentions, and include customer experience, customer dissatisfaction product availability enquiries, sales and pricing questions and service and facilities feedback. We’ll be sharing more of this data on the 19th.
In my vision for the contact center of the future, social relationships with customers sit at the heart of your organisation. Companies will have to consider some serious structural reorganisation of not only how they manage communication with their customers, but also how they perceive it. Customer service will no longer be relegated as an inconvenient cost center, but as the front line of customer engagement.
Join us next Tuesday to discuss market trends, the experiences of leaders in this space and pick the brains of our panel of experts as to how you can start delivering real social customer service in your company. We’ll be opening up discussion that’s relevant for every customer-focused role in your company, so if you’re looking for answers to ‘what is social customer service anyway?’ we should be able to help.