In our survey of 200 leading business to consumer Facebook pages, Social Yantra has identified that 34% of the posts from customers on these Facebook pages are "actionable". Meaning, there is an opportunity for these companies to respond and actively engage in the conversation that's been initiated by their customers on customer service and sales related topics.
More surprising is that less than 1% of these posts are receiving any response directly from the company.* Therefore, losing an opportunity to directly relate to their customers. For companies who have embraced their Facebook Page as a complete customer resource you will find special offers, news, conversations among fans and of course answers to customer service questions.
As in the case of Southwest Airlines, which has 1,291,776 fans, they are on the right track. While the response times on Facebook are improving vs. calling into the contact center, we do see interactive smiley faces, thumbs up and words like "thank you" from the fans that are posted for the world to see. This leaves a visible impression that their customers are being taken care of.
View of Southwest Airlines' Facebook Page sentiment analysis from Social Yantra.
View of a conversation about the website status on the Southwest Airlines Facebook page.
View of a successful customer service response on the Southwest Airlines Facebook page.
As I read more of the post and conversations on the Southwest Airlines page the true spirit of Social Media is flourishing and the community is not just asking questions, they are also doing providing answers. In the Harvard Business Review (7/28/10) article "Why Your Customers Don't Want to Talk to You" by Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff, they point out an interesting statistic that, "57% of inbound calls come from customers who first attempted to resolve their issue on the company's website." But why is this important? Simply that customers are online.
What's special about a company Facebook page as we can see from the Southwest Airlines example above is that they have created a comfortable place for customers where answers are available to many and not isolated to answering the same question multiple times as in a traditional, silo-like call center setting. Using an already familiar forum such as Facebook, customers can help and relate to each other in short amount of time-and that's what Social Media is all about, with the bonus that it's all done without ever being on a phone queue.
* The statistics are based on the Social Yantra platform which has an automated solution to perform ongoing natural language processing (NLP) text analysis of posts and conversations on any corporate Facebook page to determine if the post is noise or actionable with a 92% accuracy rate. A free version of this tool is available to anyone to track any company Facebook page at www.socialyantra.com.