Customer service is undergoing a major evolution, with online communication moving away from private, anonymous, one-to-one channels to public, one-to-many channels that are mobile, social, and attached to real identity. In the midst of this shift, it’s comforting to know that the core principles of great customer service still apply to social media.

Quality customer service — regardless of channel — relies on a meaningful dialogue taking place between brands and their customers. That said, these shifts in consumer behavior and communication technology require your organization to re-think its customer service strategy.

Multi-channel communication and customer expectations

Social media has reached a high level of maturity as a communication channel. People have found appropriate ways to effectively integrate it into their lives alongside other technologies and they expect brands to have followed suit on the channels they choose. Inbound social customer service inquiries start on social (“Where is my X?"), move to a private channel (details of X given) and then finish back where they began (“Thanks for delivering my X!").

Shifting ownership of social

Ownership of social media is shifting away from Marketing and Communication as engagement increasingly relates to inbound customer service-based topics. Rather than social being seen purely as a space for companies to deliver outbound marketing messages, it is the inbound customer queries that allow for meaningful points of engagement and the building of brand advocacy.

Technological limitations

Social media mixes public and private discussions, and combines customer service issues with general chatter and engagement. As such, it requires different approaches to prioritization, workflow and analytics.

All-in-one social media tools built for marketing are not designed to maximize agent efficiency, enable managers to resource their team or measure agent performance against SLAs. As a result, brands must use choose a solution built for social customer service.

Higher stakes

Social media not only presents the opportunity for brands to delight customers on the channel they choose, but also significantly reduce the cost of each interaction. In fact, Gartner has found that social agents are able to handle four to eight times as many issues per hour as a phone agent.

The public nature of social media means that each successful interaction has the potential to be amplified into a peer-to-peer recommendation, delivering marketing benefit that is significantly greater than other channels. Research from NM Incite, a partnership between Nielsen and McKinsey & Company, found that consumers who encounter positive social customer care experiences are nearly three times more likely to recommend a brand than those who do not

However, social customer service also presents a high volume of interactions that run the risk of attracting negative publicity due to conversations taking place in a very public manner. Companies must therefore deeply embed their social customer service operation internally - taking all the steps necessary to minimize risk while optimizing results.

This guide is designed to help you deliver social customer service from the Contact Center as a standardized, scalable and ROI-positive operation that lives up to your brand’s promise of quality service.