Most customer support managers agree that social media will continue to grow as a major channel for handling customer issues and resolving problems. While this is generally understood, what stands out is the lack of integration with established support channels, such as the telephone, Web and email. Companies have made substantial investments in handling customer requests over these traditional channels but often support their social channels with informal teams that are disconnected from the primary support channels. What many support managers fail to realize is that the majority of customers that post a request on social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter will also place a call into the contact center if their issue is not immediately addressed. This results in double handling a request resulting in increasing number of calls and costs. With the average cost of an assisted contact between $7 and $9 duplicate handling is expensive and often leads to customer frustration.
Integrating social media sites into the core customer support operations has been a slow process. Many do not see the value of doing this and fail to quantify the costs of not doing it. There are several steps a company can do to address this issue and improve their response times to customers. These include
- Measure speed of response for social sites. Customers using social sites expect an immediate or short term response and will use alternate channels if a response is not received quickly.
- Determine first contact resolution rates. Track social comments and verify if the issue is resolved or if further contact was made.
- Evaluate response accuracy. The informal team that supports social sites seldom has full access to the databases and customer information systems found in the call center. While they may have limited access to information, they do not necessarily have customer records available to them.
- Regularly capture and record customer comments in the customer database. This provides information on what issues are important and can be mined for future analysis on customer interests and sentiments.
- Determine the influence of media reach for the social sites. If customer comments reach a large population, then a public response may be needed to reduce the damage of negative comments.
- Decide skills needed for social sites. Responders do not necessarily need to come from core customer support operations but they need to be part of the customer service operation with full access to tools and technologies needed. It is important to store all responses in the customer information system, so when a customer makes an additional call on the same topic, the previous response in available to the CSR
Companies need to do a better job of understanding the rapid rise of social channels for product support issues. Marketing and service organizations must create a seamless customer experience and develop processes and add tools to integrate all channels to deliver first- time accurate responses.