Your Tweet is Important, Please Hold

A larger number of customers are using social media networks as a means for making queries and complaining about products than ever before. This begs the question, is social media ready to take the role of primary route for customer service away from call centers?

“Consumers are communicating more than ever before through social media and growing accustomed to real-time responses from peers on Twitter, Facebook and peer-to-peer communities, “said Justin Schuster, vice president of Product Marketing at Lithium Technologies, a provider of Social CRM. They increasingly expect brands to respond in real time to complaints and questions as well, and social customer care has rapidly emerged to address this gap.”

Research by Nielsen and McKinsey shows that almost 50 percent of all social media users have switched to social networks to find resolution to customer service problems. Furthermore, around a third of social media users prefer this method of contact rather than making a phone call. In spite of this, during 2011, around 70 percent of complaints made to companies via twitter went ignored.

“Consumers are turning to social media to resolveproblems, but most companies are still lagging behind this evolution. This presents a real opportunity for leading brands to separate themselves from their competition,” said Schuster.

Lithium Technologies’ Social Web provides a process which enables companies to manage customer service communication coming in via social network channels. Social Web also provides tools to ensure companies are utilizing it in a most effective and efficient manner.

“Consumers are looking for frictionless platforms for solving issues, and expect service agents to be as accessible as their smartphone apps,” Schuster continued.

Social Web enables companies to provide customer support on social networks like Facebook and Twitter on scalable level. It does so by collecting data from the social networks and applying workflow rules, tags and filters to correctly channel the service to the most applicable resource. It then pulls relevant information, such as user profile, conversation history and agent notes into a single view so that each post may be worked efficiently. Finally it relays the information to a role-based dashboard where managers can check agent performance in real time.

Several major companies have already had success with Lithium’s Social Web. In just four weeks, AT&T used Social Web to resolve more than 21,000 customer issues. Tom Tom saved $150,000 in customer support and Best Buy saved over $5 million in customer support and sales advocacy in one month.

Recently the Lithium-CMO Council conducted a social media survey and found that almost 50 percent of customers communicating via social channels expect a response within an hour. This is an indication that companies need the right tools to meet these expectations.

Schuster said, “Customers tell us this we are the first social engagement platform they have seen that has truly been developed from the ground up for social customer care.” (CU) Link