Social Media Customer Service, to be or not to be?

There seems to be a tug of war going on with the progress of Social Media adoption within Customer Service. Some articles are excited about Social Media channels like Twitter in becoming the hub of customer service, while others seem to expel the idea of Social Media making a strong impact in this regard. Who do you believe?

Everything is Customer Service

The bulk of this confusion stems from misunderstanding of what customer service really is. Everything is customer service. Every business that has ever been built has been done so for one reason only - to serve its customers. A farmer whose customer service is the quality produce he is growing, a trucking company that delivers produce offers customer service by delivering it on time, and even a water pumping station that supplies water for growing plants has customer service by supplying the right amount and quality of water for irrigation.

These are all examples of business cases with customer service in mind. Quality customer service, however, is not unidirectional. It is not enough to simply make an effort to serve customers. Customer service consists of both, delivery of service and receipt of customer feedback, an ongoing cycle of service and validation of its quality.

Now, lets go back to Social Media. It is a very hot topic. Its got loads of people on it, and many use it for different reasons. It is a Swiss Army knife of people's Voice and if the Voice happens to provide feedback about the business or service quality, then what we get is Voice of the Customer and hence it becomes very important to tap into it to listen.

Bottomless Bucket of Customer Voice

Twitter, for example, is one of the major Social Media channels of customer feedback. It is widely accessible and very easy to use. Hence, it can be tapped for a vast number of automatic, free flowing inbound information. Problems arise when this channel is utilized to communicate both ways rather than just being a problem or happiness loudspeaker, especially when further clarity is necessary to offer a quality customer service.

When customer's interaction does not produce enough information to the business and requires the business to follow up, things generally begin to fall apart. Just imagine your latest customer service requests. How many tweets would it take to get to the answer of your question? Would you have patience to wait for a response? So, if the communication desired is quick and interactive, then its better to use some kind of chat. Likewise, if the communication is not immediate, then Twitter inquiry basically becomes a publicly accessible email exchange.

Thus, selecting the right Social Media channel of customer feedback must be a planned strategic effort, rather than an open container. It is possible to do just as much damage and customer dissatisfaction by not being able to process and respond to incoming messages as the good in being able to actually intercept and recognize critical customer messages. So when Twitter channel is created for customer voice, it essentially creates a bottomless bucket.

Customers can throw issues into Twitter, for example, all day long, but as with any open container of unpredictable and continuously flowing information, there has to be something to sort this information out and report on it. Analytics and trending are a good place to start, but Social Media text format is unique in its own shortened form with lots of new words, shortcuts, spellings and acronyms being used. How do you define an automated system so "human" that it would be able to really understand the quality of the post, marking it for importance, or trashing it as spam? Yes, there are systems to help sort the text and distribute it among the members of social media customer support groups. There are systems that allow configuring and analyzing text to adequately assess the written information. But even then, if the organization does not go through every single tweet, how can it be sure not to miss an important message, especially if attempting to automate as much as possible?

Long term, as the numbers of Social Media Customer Service inquiries continues to increase, it is not hard to imagine the Social Media automation that is being created today to alleviate the pains of customer support slowly begin to require human staffed roles. Human agents will be needed to respond to undecipherable messages in order to qualify, provide response, and interact with the customers in a social media, pop culture driven dialect. Similarly to 1970s mailed complaint departments being replaced by 800 number call centers, we are seeing a next phase of the cycle recreating the same, but much more technologically advanced electronic customer complaint groups.

Security

Lastly, lets go over security aspects of Social Media. The main word is well...don't! Social Media is not a channel of providing your account information, password, or any other pertinent account details even over the private messages. It is best used for anonymous product or service feedback, a basic question, recommendation, or a review. With cloud based storage, ubiquitous connectivity from any device, and our human preference of having devices remember our passwords, we drop our guard and make it too easy to gain access to our private information. While you can argue that the same is true for email, most would agree that we tend to guard our email communications a little more than our twitter posts.

To be or not to be?

After looking at Social Customer Service in further detail, it seems that its application in customer service space is a very fine niche. Ideal for Voice of the Customer asynchronous message delivery, that is a good blend of simultaneously being publicly facing ( meaning many people will read it after ) and convenient ( easily submitted in a free textual form rather than structured surveys or hard to find website forms).

What we will continue seeing is websites beginning to remove various types of web feedback forms and instead guide the users to use Social Media channels. The websites themselves will continue morphing to glamorous landing pages, rather than centralized hubs of information. Any detailed information will be pushed off to blogs, article posts, and knowledge bases, creating a so called Lightweight Web.

Social media will certainly retain its place in Customer Service and will continue to grow as this approach becomes a standard. Yet, it will still remain to be a niche use among a vast number of Customer Service needs.

Innovation trends occur in repeatable cycles. Soon, the technology will once again advance, bringing more sophisticated and widely available speech recognition and visual analytics, allowing a delivery of customer feedback in native verbal and visual video form. These innovations would offer a much easier and direct channel of supplying customer feedback, eliminating the high speed typing and texting we seem to enjoy so much today.