Customer Service and the Social Media Imperative

This blog entry was posted by Ed Margulies, co-founder of Face It Corp. ("Putting a Pretty Face on Customer Service"). Margulies is a telecommunications architect, usability expert, inventor, and the author of 17 books on telecommunications, contact centers and service automation.

Social Media Wake-Up Call

What do Proctor & Gamble, IBM, and Wells Fargo have in common? These companies are consciously leveraging social media. For years, social media has been useful for one-to-one communications and self-promotion, but now the customer service implications are too important to ignore.

Social Media: Not Just a Fad

Despite being a charter member of LinkedIn since 2003, I did not instantly recognize the customer service potential of social networking. Most customer service and contact center executives were dismissing social networking as a time-wasting distraction. The collective mindset was "My agents are not going to play around on the Internet - I'm blocking those sites."

It's easy to contemplate how one-to-one sales organizations and small businesses can use social networking. For example, Luxury Insights, an organization for real estate agents, conducted an internal study recently. They wanted to understand the impact social media has on home sales. They found more than 80% of their members use social networks, with over half being LinkedIn or FaceBook users. And 20% say they have either "given or received" referrals via social networks.

But less obvious are how big businesses can use social media. I read with great interest a Harvard Business Review blog called "The Über-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010. " Here firms such as IBM and Toshiba are credited with embracing social media as a means to improve employee collaboration.

Change or Become Irrelevant

But what about the contact center? Eric Ken Shinseki, our United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs, is a retired U.S. Army four-star general. He is attributed with forward-looking initiatives while serving in the army. He once said: "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." It seems apropos to consider this notion with customer service.

 Until recently, companies where only on the "receiving end" of social media. That is in receiving criticism. Take, for example, the now-famous YouTube video: "A Comcast Technician Sleeping on my Couch." Comcast, the largest cable company in the U.S., took a lot of heat in the traditional media for its legendary customer service hold times and poor treatment of customers. The YouTube video signaled a call to action. Since then, the company has done a major technology upgrade, hired more agents, and is the proud owner of a Twitter account for customer service.

Comcast is clearly amongst those enterprises choosing to be relevant. So companies are beginning to embrace social media as internal "glue" to foster collaboration with their employees and sales people are using it to swap leads and grow business. And over the past few years, companies are increasingly leveraging social media as a serious outlet for customer service.

Does it Take Embarrassment to Embrace Social Media?

So are companies embracing social media only begrudgingly or when embarrassed into it? Gladly, no. There are some companies who are actually doing it proactively. And more companies are beginning to swap best practices and participate in benchmark studies.

For example, the SMBC (Social Media Business Council) touts dozens of Fortune 500 companies as members. Here representatives from these companies meet frequently, produce conferences and share best practices in implementing social media programs. Some of the more vocal companies are Procter & Gamble, Dell and Wells Fargo.

According to Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study, 23% of the time, it is the Customer Support department driving the use of social media. That's runner-up to the Marketing department at 66%. Over 2,900 respondents were part of the survey, so the size of companies represented are diverse. Interestingly, over half of the respondents are C-level or senior management employees, so it is pretty clear that social networking has captured the interest of business leaders.

Grooming Customer Service for Social Media

There are five general areas of specialization you need to contemplate in managing social media for your company. As with multi-channel assignments (i.e. phone, chat, email, etc.) you need to decide how to assign social media channels as well. First, let's take a look at the chief disciplines you will be managing: 1) Monitoring and Filtering; 2) Managing Business Content; 3) On-Line Community and Q&A; 4) Blogging and Micro-Blogging; and 5) Escalation procedures.

Monitoring and Filtering. Monitoring is about "having your antennae out" so you can understand what is being said about your company and your customer service. Common tools available are Google Alerts and Twitter Search which are free. Premium-based services available are Nielsen's BuzzMetrics and Factiva to name a few. You need agents who know how to use these tools and -- just as importantly -- how to filter through the garbage to identify real opportunities to communicate.

Managing Business Content. In addition to your company web site, social media provides an additional outlet for you to broadcast content. For example, you can use YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Slideshare to publish video and photos. These can be instructional videos and can be service-oriented. Most content sites have feedback mechanisms, so while your marketing communications department may post the content, your customer service employees can wrangle the feedback.

On-Line Community and Q&A. There are a handful of popular Q&A-oriented sites such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and LinkedIn Answers. All provide an informal means for customers to ask questions or make statements about your company and its service. More sophisticated services are available such as Lithium and GetSatisfaction, where you can get chat, service feedback widgets and software to build-out a social CRM community. The implications for agents are very diverse here, ranging from answers to on-line tickets to live chat.

Blogging and Micro-Blogging. Although most blogging activity is "outbound" these writings nonetheless are a magnet for feedback. For example, micro-blogging with Twitter allows for broadcast, but you can also filter on phrases and get direct responses to posts. You can have as few as one person, or even a part-timer do this, or you may need an entire team depending on traffic and feedback.

Escalation procedures. Regardless of media type, there is always an impact on agent resources and of course supervisors when it comes to escalations. It's my personal opinion that escalation should be media-independent, so you can piggy-back on existing procedures.

Taking the Social Media Plunge

Although embracing social media may be a change for your company, I recommend taking advantage of all of the new research on this subject so you can assess the ways you can use social media to improve customer service. If you have not done it yet, assign a task force to answer the question: "How can we leverage social media to improve our company?" Give them corporate sponsorship and support.

I'd also like to recommend further reading on this topic. Check out Chris Boudreaux, a consultant at Accenture, who has a book-in-progress entitled: "Social Media Governance: Empowerment with Accountability." He blogs intelligently on the subject (http://socialmediagovernance.com/blog/) so he represents another source for you to stay relevant in today's ever-changing business landscape.