How Social Customer Service Can Make You Money
Customer service has always been that business competency that either makes or breaks the customer experience. Over the past decade, many large organizations recognized this fact and have heavily invested in ensuring extraordinary customer service. In recent years, social customer service has become a necessity.
Social customer service can increase revenue in five ways:
Increased Awareness: Addressing customers issues via social media provides interesting content. The more you help, the better the chances customers will find you.
Increased Customer Satisfaction: The great thing about social customer service is that other customers, who are satisfied with you get the opportunity to observe & participate with other customers. This has the potential of increasing their satisfaction through education. I’ve seen a discussion board with customer service interactions between a software company and its customers; many of the posts indicated that the customers reading the posts discovered additional functionality they’d never have known about. Of course, simply solving a customers problem increases their satisfaction.
Public Customer Reviews: Each time provide customer service via social media is another opportunity to have a public customer review. It shows the issues customers have, and shows how your company deals with those issues. In public forums, an unsatisfied customer doesn’t necessarily mean a bad review. If the company does everything it can, but the customer is unreasonable; the public will often express it’s admiration of the company, and dismiss the customer as unreasonable.
Decreased Return-Rate: As with all good customer service, good social customer service can help turn a brand dissident into a brand advocate. Additionally, social customer service can act as a qualifier in the sense of making sure potential customers are buying the right thing. (i.e. If the Twelp Force informs a customer that the printer he purchased isn’t compatible with a Mac, it could help ensure other Mac owners don’t buy that printer.)
Increased Brand Loyalty: One of the best ways to create brand loyalty is by showing how a company deals with customers who’ve had issues. I recently saw a series of blog posts about a bad experience a lady had with a hotel chain. The post outlined her issues, and the email she sent to management. Subsequent posts outlined responses; and a credit issued for the cost of the stay. This type of story could have made me skeptical about staying at the hotel chain she stayed at; but the way the company handled the issues actually made me confident enough to try them. Additionally, the lady was satisfied with the outcome and probably would be willing to try them again.
How do I achieve the best results?
(If you don’t chose a model, your customers will resort to model A)
Model A: Customer seeks customer service
This model could be indirect; where customers are posting complaints about a company. Essentially, this model applies to any customer that requires customer service and is willing to engage in social media.
Model B: Brand seeks out customers in need of customer service
This model involves a brand, or a brand collective, searching out and responding to customer issues.
Model C: Brand encourages & supports a customer support community
This model often has an aggregation site where customer inquires are vetted or categorized and responded to by both brand employees and other customers. Sometimes, brands simply have an account on a particular site and encourage customers to respond to customers with issues.
Step 2: Communicate responses to questions customers need answered prior to engaging in social customer service
Question 1: “What can I get support with?”
