The New Approach to Customer Service

When I reflect on my career, I've spent a lot of time focused on improving customer care and experience for both customers and for the companies where I've worked. For much of that time, care teams were thought of as cost centers?? important, but an efficiency play. Businesses were looking to resolve customers’ problems as quickly as possible and then move onto the next query. It was highly unlikely that the feedback from these contact centers, who have direct conversations with customers everyday, would make it to the product, marketing, or sales teams. The shift that I have seen over the last decade is with disruptors in the industry—driven by apps that have built their businesses around customer experience, and have put customers at the center of their business. Some great examples of companies who have done this well include Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and Instacart to name a few.?

We’ve all seen the impact that customer care has on our relationships with companies. Personal conversations and a frictionless customer experience create loyalty, while bad customer experiences end relationships with companies. The conversations are the golden thread.?We are seeing the demarcation between sales, marketing and customer service come down when companies leverage these golden conversations ?? and social media and messaging platforms are rapidly replacing traditional channels where these conversations happen. The pandemic accelerated the use of social media for organizations that had social media buried deep in the marketing department. Brands began to get overwhelmed by incoming messages on social media regarding everything from product, to service issues and pricing. Most traditional marketing organizations didn't have a mechanism in place to respond to these inquiries in a timely way.

Earlier this year, Hootsuite acquired Sparkcentral, a social customer care platform where businesses can interact with customers on messenger apps. Sparkcentral was able to bridge the gap and move public conversations on social to private conversations on messaging platforms. We recently acquired Heyday as well, which has been the perfect addition to our customer care journey—seamlessly integrating chatbots and AI to increase speed and accuracy in solving customers’ problems. Social media and social commerce give brands the opportunity to market things in a very bespoke way. While the pandemic accelerated the need for all companies to have social care capabilities in order to stay connected to their customers, there’s no going back, it’s here to stay.

Hootsuite has always been a dominant social marketing platform. As pioneers in the space, we know social, and we know where it’s going. It’s our job to help navigate our customers there, and I believe that’s towards social care and social commerce—which is where we’re investing.

Chime in with your customer care stories and how your experience has changed with social. I’d love to hear it.