Social customer relationship management is truly the future and organizations need be embrace this channel as quickly as possible for a number of compelling reasons. For one, it responds to the rise of the “social customer.” The social customer is the person who turns to Twitter and Facebook to learn about new products and brands and trusts the feedback their peer-to-peer community provides about these brands and products.
Meanwhile, because almost everything today happens in real-time – leaving companies little time to analyze, measure, and react to customers – the agility that social CRM offers is more important than ever before. Even customers who might not define themselves as a “social customer” often expect a company will respond to the feedback they leave via social media channels. Rare is the day a negative tweet goes without a response from a company rep.
Meanwhile, it is becoming more apparent that companies desire a more accurate and individual view of each customer and the only way to achieve this so far is with social CRM tools. And if used correctly, these are the tools that can better communicate with the customer community and garner a new intimacy that until now has eluded marketing experts.
Companies that prosper in the future will be those that best know what their customers want and need. The combination of CRM and social media is how companies will sense change even before their customers do. Possibly the most compelling reasons for companies to begin embracing social CRM, however, are the abilities to share vital information and to pool customer knowledge across job and department silos. The frontrunner for tackling this social CRM task so far would have to be Twitter.
Given the fact that Twitter is closing in on 200 million members, the chances are very good that more than a few tweeters have mentioned your brand or talked about your product or service already. And anytime a lot of people are vocalizing their opinions and experiences with your organization on a daily basis, they are generating the kind of marketing moxie organizations pay big bucks to get. That’s the good news.
The bad news is too many companies do not nurture or cultivate their Twitter following. Failure to listen and engage with your company’s Twitter following and the Twitter community at large means missing out on myriad fantastic opportunities, including the chance to offer innovative customer support.
Great customer service on Twitter is not just about answering questions and defusing or recovering from complaints. You have the opportunity to add value to your customer experience by sharing knowledge and resources that help your customers learn more about your products or services. It’s the most proactive form of customer support out there: answering questions that customers might not have asked yet (see figure 1 below).
What’s more, the public has expressed a keen desire to use Twitter for its support needs. Almost 20 percent of people using Twitter are seeking customer support from a business each month. When you include people wanting to learn about products or services you’re getting up to 61 percent of Twitter users.
Meeting customer demand, however, isn’t the only thing to be gained from integrating Twitter into your customer support. There is also the potential for significant cost savings. Phone support is the second most expensive support channel an organization can offer (with face-to-face being the first), according to research by Benchmark Portal. That same research shows that the average customer service call time is 5.97 minutes, which adds up to a lot of money if your organization fields a high-volume of calls. Benchmark estimates that hundreds of thousands of dollars can be saved by simply reducing average call times by 10 percent. Imagine the savings to be had by using Twitter, where customer service issues can be identified immediately and resolved at limited personnel cost in a fraction of the time.
Where to Begin
Before implementing anything, it’s crucial that everyone in your company understands what Twitter is, and why you’re offering customer service through it. As ubiquitous as Twitter has become, there will inevitably be someone in your organization that has no idea what using Twitter entails. And even if everyone on your staff is a tweeting maven, it’s not guaranteed they have all been paying diligent attention to your company’s Twitter activity. In building a Twitter strategy for customer support, do not overlook building an efficient and elegant way of when it’s time to take a conversation off Twitter and transfer it to email or phone.
Next, start to build a picture of what your organization’s Twitter activity looks like. Run a Twitter search on http://search.twitter.com for your brand and product names to see if people are talking about you already, and if so how many mentions you are receiving. Mentions may be your @TwitterName or just you brand name without the @ sign, so look for both.
If you want to widen the search to other social networks, there are hundreds of social media tools out there, both free and paid, that you can use to locate and analyze conversations and mentions of your brand, such as Social Mention (http://socialmention.com) and oneforty (http://oneforty.com). These tools and others can help you identify what percentage of tweets mentioning your brands are questions seeking support, general comments or conversations that may not need to involve you.
Be the first to comment on this post using the section below.