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Social Media Benefits Everyone at Call Centers

By TMCnet Staff

Marketers today spend a lot of time managing various channels. Since the dawn of the Internet, channels have been piling on quickly, and every few years have seen yet another media channel added that marketers have had to juggle along with the more traditional mix.

Social media is the marketing and customer support channel that has launched a thousand white papers. It’s complex for a number of reasons. It’s new and it’s extremely multifaceted. (Marketing via Twitter (News - Alert), for example, is very different than marketing via YouTube or Facebook.) And there’s some disagreement about how two-way social media channels need to be.

There’s one fact that no one can dispute: social media is popular and getting more so, the channels are evolving and changing all the time, and customers aren’t about to stop using them anytime soon. As scared as organizations may be about having to engage in two-way conversations via social media for the purpose of customer support, the need to begin doing so today is not going to go away if we pretend it doesn’t exist.

Tricia Morris, writing for Business2Community recently, noted that, “You can’t shut down the oncoming lanes of a superhighway that millions now use every day.”

The results of studies regarding how heavily customers use social media for customer support vary wildly, which has given enterprises and marketing departments some hope that social media is just a flash in the pan when it comes to the contact center and marketing department. Chances are good that these studies are talking to the wrong people: while usage may still be low across all American demographics, young people are heavy users of social media. And while a relatively small number of people choose to engage and complain (or praise) via social media, those who do so are loud and influential. Gartner (News - Alert) has predicted that refusing to communicate with customers via social media would be as harmful as ignoring emails or phone calls.

“They were right, as ignoring a single customer’s post or tweet can quickly draw a crowd or create a PR nightmare that many brands have learned the hard way,” said Morris. “Ignoring customers on a major communication channel also goes against the biggest trends and best practices that separate today’s business leaders from the laggards, including supporting customers on the channel of their convenience, digital transformation, and focusing on customer-centricity across every department. And hey, it is called social media.”

While a customer dissatisfied by telephone service might tell a half-dozen people, a heavy Twitter user dissatisfied with service could tell 1,000 people. If the post is clever enough, many of those followers might retweet the put-down. The damage that can do to a brand is incalculable.

So rather than wishing and hoping and shutting down the two-way social media customer support conversation, smart brands today need to be building: building a social media presence for customer service, feedback, brand conversation and advocacy. As with the contact center, it shouldn’t be seen as a dreaded task but an opportunity: an effective social media marketing campaign can reach customers right where they are: spending a large part of the day staring at the screens of their devices.