Global adoption of social media and mobile applications continues at an accelerated pace that challenges companies to develop a strategy for supporting the growing number of customers using newer channels for service requests. Although companies invest heavily in the creation of their social sites, they have limited visibility into all the activity that mentions, promotes or criticizes them. Currently, informal work teams provide most social customer support today, but they lack defined processes and access to customer data to accurately handle the high volume of social customer requests. To ensure successful customer engagements over social networking sites, companies must coordinate with existing customer support teams to define a strategy to deliver consistent cross-channel customer support. They must also develop new metrics to accurately measure their success in responding to social networking customers. Social business interactions will continue to soar and companies need to develop a plan immediately to meet this growing wave for customer engagements.
This best practices quark is designed to guide business decision makers through the essentials of developing an effective social media response strategy. The quark opens with a business case for creating a social media response strategy, and then outlines six steps essential for effective social media response. Recommendations for ensuring the customer is the top priority in your social media response strategy close out the quark.