Ah, the allure of Social Media.
The rise of the Social Customer and the advent of Social Media has thrown a monster-sized monkey wrench into the operations of the organization. Slowly we have seen good examples emerge of adoption of Social Media by the different business units and stakeholders in the organization.
Social sales has seen the rise of Dell Outlet and the buildup to millions of dollars in additional sales leveraging traditional sales models and new channels. Social Marketing is now in its second generation where vendors like OfferPop, CrowdFactory, beRelevant, and Idea Magnet are beginning to implement marketing functions across social channels with more tracking, better features, and a focus on marketing with the customer, not to them.
And there, there is Social Service.
Our own Frank Eliason, a member of the advisory board for TheSocialCustomer.com and better known as @comcastcares, was responsible for turning an entire company on its head by introducing the idea of Social Service into their operations.
However, Frank will be the first one to tell you (as will the people responsible for the examples mentioned above) that success with social tools is impossible without going behind the tools and the channels. Twitter is interesting, but it cannot accommodate more than handful of use cases for support. Communities are useful, but by themselves are merely limited to solving less than 20% of all support incidents.
So, how are you going to be successful in deploying Social Service?
I found three things you MUST understand and think about to succeed at Social Service:
- It is not about the channel. Most people are so focused on the intricacies, quirks, and functioning of each channel that they lose sight of what they are trying to do. No organization wants to do Twitter. They want to do customer service via Twitter. It is almost as if we developed amnesia of the lessons learned when we brought Chat, Email, and SMS into the Customer Service department. We learned back then that that each channel and interaction model had a very specific purpose for which it worked great, and others for which it did not. We learned that we needed to have common knowledge and rules across all channels to deliver consistently. We learned all that, and then we forgot it as soon as the "shiny new channel" was brought along. There is nothing new on Twitter that email could not have done -- for the proper interaction.
- It is not about the efficiency. We learned, or at least I hope we learned, early on that metrics that worked for one channel do not work the same for others. The cost structure of a telephone call, for example, is sufficiently different from the one for an email that counting the length of time it takes to answer an email is pretty much useless (caveat: SLAs are a different story). Indeed, handling time for an email, or a chat session, or any other interaction is not the same as handle time for a telephone call. The shift in customer expectations from "do something" to "do something right" spurred the transition to effectiveness metrics. The data we tracked is not about how fast we can do something, but about how fast we can do the right thing. And this is amplified by the volume and expectations the customer has for the new social channels. The metrics, and SLAs, we use to monitor how well Social Service is performing are going to be significantly different.
- It is not about the relationship. I hate to break the news, but customers don't want relationships, they don't want engagement, they don't want conversations . They simply want to get their tasks done. Don't invest in overly complicated models to establish relationships, or try to justify engaging customers in a conversation about what they want. If they want to tell you, you don't need to ask them. If they just want to get their stuff done - let them. Make it simple, make it short, make it easy. There is nothing you can do in Social Service that you could not have done before - so don't got overboard about the "new features" that Social brings.
OK, I can hear you think - so just think about that and I can succeed?
Yep. Money back guaranteed.
What do you think? Am I wrong? Is there something I forgot?