Using Social Media to Revolutionize Customer Service

The Pitfalls of a Band-aid Approach

Petouhoff says that a social service strategy is not in itself the aim in this situation – a full reconsideration of how your company delivers service is in order. Because of its second-class status as a necessary evil or a cost center, customer service as a whole has been suffering for decades, she says. "This is the time not only to start a social strategy but to fix the things that are systematically wrong in your business."

Implementing a social component to your service organization without altering other aspects of how you deliver service would be similar to the mistakes frequently made in the past, where layers of 'fixes' intended to remedy current problems result in a byzantine set of service processes that result in a terrible customer experience.

"Take care of the job I expect to get done," says Paul Greenberg. "If I’m asking for the address to send something back, make it easy for me to send something back. Among those things are ‘give me the address to send it to.'"

If it takes multiple calls or a game of hopscotch through an IVR system, what should be a simple transaction can result in a frustrated customer. "None of that needs a social strategy, per se. It needs a service strategy that takes care of the social customer’s or the non-social customer’s requirement. If this set of processes – which accounts for that 90 percent or more of all service interactions – is broken – a social strategy can be a diversion or even worse, a transmission belt for viral rage at the company for its broken processes. Not good."

Conclusion

The impact of social media could have a transformational effect on customer service itself, if only because the opportunity for customers to voice their dissatisfaction with poor support has never been more available and more far-reaching. But beyond the squeaky wheel syndrome, forward-looking service organizations can get involved in building customer loyalty, establishing their organizations as thought leaders, and showing how responsive their service teams really are.

To do that, they need to strategize about their approaches in much the same way as marketing and sales do to learn who the service customer is, how they want to engage with the company and what the company’s goals should be for service. It also requires a re-thinking of the service agent’s role, from that of the keeper of knowledge about an organization to that of a knowledgeable peer who can learn from conversations as he helps inform others. From there, it’s vital that knowledge generated by customers, about products, services or service processes, is evaluated and internalized to make service ever better.