Social Media in the Contact Center: Hype or Strategy?
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Social Media in the Contact Center: Hype or Strategy? by Nancy Jamison
It’s been about two years since analysts and industry watchers fervently started writing about the use of social media in the contact center to provide customer service. The idea that a company can listen to the conversations that happen on social media sites, monitor what is being said about their company and their competitors, and cull actionable data from those feeds is very compelling, especially when interactions can be sent to an agent just like a customer phone call. Much has been written about using social media to increase brand awareness, finding “brand ambassadors” that can promote your company and products, and finding customer issues before they go viral on social media sites. Many vendors and analysts have been touting the idea of integrating social media into the contact center and treating it as “just another contact center channel.”
Now is the time to determine if the use of social media as a contact center channel is hype or the right strategy for your company.
The reality is, not every company needs to worry about adding social media to their customer service channel mix. Despite the press, social media monitoring and response hasn’t yet taken off quite the way that we thought it would, with use cases being slow to trickle in. The bottom line is that it is not necessary for every company to worry about adding social media to their customer service channel mix – at least not today. While it makes sense for certain types of companies, it’s important to evaluate whether or not integrating social media into your contact center operations makes sense for your particular business.
Why the Hype?
Initial hype over social media and its role in customer care was driven by the phenomenal growth in the use of social media across demographics and geographies. While popularity of different sites shift, the growing use of one or more social media outlets continues to grow at a rate that probably surprises many people.
The ability to harness customer conversations on social networking sites provides a unique opportunity to find customers that are happy and can promote your brands. This is quite different from the more traditional contact center service role. After all, how often do you have a customer call into your contact center for the sole purpose of telling you how great you are?
Because the use of social media is so viral, some companies have become afraid that they’ll miss the boat on using social media to promote their brands or suffer at the hands of an angry customer. When CEOs and CXOs hear cases of a customer getting angry and using Twitter, Facebook or YouTube to complain, with those complaints subsequently going viral, they get scared and pay attention. But do these few cases mean that everyone needs to jump on the social media bandwagon, and that contact centers need to embrace social media as a new channel? Not necessarily.
What IBM Found Out Might Surprise You
There is a large disconnect between what consumers and business executives expect from social media. In late 2010, the IBM Institute for Business Value conducted a study of over 1000 consumers and 350 business executives to understand who is using social media, which social media sites they use, and what drives them to engage with a business through those sites (ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03391usen/GBE03391USEN.PDF). The social media hype is real, as the poll showed that nearly 70% of executives feel that they will be perceived as “out of touch” if they don’t engage with customers through social media, and over half believe that their competitors already are reaching out through that channel.
What is most interesting is the difference in perceptions between the consumers and CEOs surveyed about why consumers use social media. The survey showed that for the consumer, social media is all about engaging with friends and family, getting news and being entertained, and is not about connecting with businesses for customer service. According to the survey, when asked why they go to social media or social networking sites, 70% of consumers chose “Connecting with network of friends and family,” while only 23% noted “Interacting with brands.” Of the 45% of the respondents that do actively engage with brands on social media sites, 66% said they needed the company to communicate with them honestly first before they will even engage in a conversation. Also, consumers felt that social media engagement is needed for the purpose of receiving something of tangible value, such as a coupon or discount, rather than for the purposes of getting information
The responses and perceptions of the CEOs polled were very different. For example, CEOs said that they believed that receiving coupons or discounts was the least likely reasons that consumers would interact with a brand. And when it came to supporting their customers through social networking, 63% of CEOs said that customer service was a reason that consumers would follow them on social sites. In contrast, only 37% of the consumers surveyed said that they would engage with a company through social media for customer service.
Similarly, CEOs were three times more likely to think consumers were more interested in interacting with them in order to feel like part of a community. The results from the consumer survey clearly showed that social media is personal, and that companies shouldn’t assume an intimacy they haven’t earned. As the study pointed out, "companies might be mistakenly projecting their desires for intimacy onto customer’s motivations for interacting."
Do You Really Need Social Media as a Support Channel – Here are Some Basic Guidelines
Clearly, the survey results show that we need to look at whether or not using social media as an additional customer support channel is the right thing for your company today. In the long run, social media may very well proliferate as a support channel and a marketing tool. But not everyone has to jump in right now. For those companies wondering whether or not to integrate social media in your customer service operations, consider the following basic guidelines to determine whether you need to support social media in your contact center in the near term.
High-profile consumer brand
Is your company a high-profile consumer brand? If so, then you should definitely consider supporting social media for customer service and support. Of the early adopters of social media as a customer service channel, the majority are high-profile brands. As the IBM study showed, customers are more likely to connect with brands that they already know and love, which is typical of high-profile consumer brands.
Key verticals
Some vertical markets are more likely than others to be successful supporting a social media channel as part of a customer care strategy. For example, the travel industry (with its big names and captive population of consumers) has many opportunities to garner data and actionable information from social media postings. If my flight is delayed or bag is lost, I’m more likely to vent online during the process. If an airline is monitoring social media, they can capture my post as an opportunity to help solve my problem. They can even be proactive and contact me later.
Another vertical market likely to benefit is the entertainment market, which has a high population of customers that typically connect to social media. Consumers use their mobile devices to check into a concert or show on Foursquare or Facebook, or use social media to talk about a show or concert. This type of social media activity provides ample opportunities to capture customer interactions or gauge customer sentiment.
Retail is another vertical market that is appropriate for using social media as part of its customer care strategy. If a retail customer has an issue that they discuss via social media, companies can try to solve the problem, while also providing enhanced services such as a discount or a coupon for a future purchase. Online social sites let companies provide a printable coupon or code on the site, making it more likely that the customer will remain a customer.
Target audience fits social media profile
Does your target audience fit a social media profile? Are your customers already using social media? Are the majority of people that use your products or services more likely than not to use social media as a form of communication over other channels? There are differences between age groups, sex, educational background, etc. that drive the way that people communicate, and some groups gravitate more toward one channel than another. For example, if you are selling long-term care insurance, perhaps creating a Facebook fan page or mining tweets won’t net you the same amount of responses as it would if you were selling skateboards and sunglasses. If your services and products can be targeted at population segments already using social media and you can entice them with offers that will resonate with them, you have a better chance of engaging with customers on social sites.
Other criteria to consider are whether your customers are asking for you to support them in social media. To give yourself a bigger head start, it helps to fish where the fish are; that is, deploy social media as part of your customer care strategy if your customers are already using social media. Similarly, if your customers are asking (or telling) you to support them via social media, then you should clearly do so.
Summary
It’s important to identify whether or not it makes sense for your company to jump on the bandwagon and start adding social media to your customer service mix. While it’s not necessary for everyone, it is important for certain types of organizations, especially those that are high-profile consumer brands, in certain verticals, or where customers are actively using social media sites. For other companies, such as those that focus on businesses rather than consumers, are in more “traditional” vertical markets, or where customers are not yet utilizing social media to a great extent, now may be the time to focus your efforts on other customer service channels that can be improved, rather than bringing a new channel into the mix. This will be discussed in a subsequent article. It’s important to first understand how can you improve your existing channels to welcome and support social media so you can set yourself up for success.
This paper is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence.
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