Social media has given business a new channel to evaluate and assess the strategies that will actually be required to deliver effective customer service - even if that assessment decides that the strategy should be simply to not make customer service available on that channel. Traditionally, companies have designed and implemented formal and official processes for capturing and managing customer complaints and feedback. These processes have often attempted to define both the criteria for a complaint to be recorded and the required organisational response (to be followed when a contact meets the defined criteria). However, these processes often focused on those complaints that reached centralised complaint handling functions - the "tip of the iceberg" - the first contact resolutions in many organisations were often separated - and some were more successful than others in stimulating feedback from their customers.
Social media has challenged these traditional processes - on social media channels customers rarely state that they would like to make a formal complaint, they express how their emotions have been affected by a failure or their expectations have been left unmet. Social media is another customer contact channel but with the important characteristic that places engagement within a public arena. Therefore, poorly skilled and unempowered customer service agents will visibly struggle and expose their business to greater risk - but those businesses that do allow skilled and empowered agents to engage with customers will be able to publicly demonstrate their excellence at resolving customer issues and gain customer trust and loyalty to their brands.
The challenge is also to prevent social media channels being used as an escalation point for customers who cannot get satisfaction using traditional channels. Social media needs to be an integrated channel and organisations must make sure that they consistently gets the basics right on any channel that customers chooses to contact them on.