ClickFox describes its offering as "customer experience analytics." Recently, in cooperation with the Edelman public relations firm, they conducted a survey across businesses and customers on perceptions of customer service delivered through the use of social media. The results are interesting, which led us to request an interview with a ClickFox representative who would answer questions about the deeper implications of the results.
OUr interview was with Amir Dekel, Director of Marketing and Communications for ClickFox and he addressed our questions about the survey and what ClickFox learned about customers' habits and preferences seeking service through the Social Web.
In an accompanying post you'll find an infographic created by Edelman that desribes the higher level findings. You'll find another article on the Smart Data Collective site where Dekel talks more about social media analytics.
SMT Interview
SMT: Hello, Amir. Please tell me about this survey.
Amir Dekel: We've been doing these consumer surveys every quarter last year. We did a bunch about customers' interaction preferences, what drives them crazy, the Tipping Point survey that we did and another one was about best practices across industries, and then the last one we did is this social media survey to see if people are starting to adopt social media for customer service purposes.
That was the main goal: to see who's using it, what happens, what fails, how expensive does it get for companies. Because there's a lot of buzz around social media, using it for outreach to customers and there's a lot of confusion around what the real ROI of social media is, and this is just another layer in that discussion because if you don't tie social media to the rest of the customer experience across all the other channels, then you don't really know what the impact is.
That was the initial purpose and then Edelman helped us with this cool infographic and with the survey results and the document.
SMT: Given the development of social media over the past 2 decades, when companies strive to connect with their customers through these social media, how do they know where to begin? It seems like the obvious first step is to provide an email address for customers to use, and now we see a lot of offerings like instant chat services with the customer service rep, we see that many people have become involved with social media - primarily because of Facebook because of its low barrier to entry, and for many that is their social media experience. Then there are many who prefer using Twitter, and they tend to be a bit more sophisticated in their use of the Web.
Amir: I agree. The marketplace is so fractured that there are many different avenues to contact companies today, and that is another thing that we looked at in the survey - that 76% of respondents said that they would be more likely to use social media for customer service if they only understood what to use - what are the best tools to use...like you said, someone on Twitter who is a Comcast user might connect with Comcast Cares, but how would they know about it? Would they find it through the general buzz around that, that there is a Comcast Cares account that might be able to help them with their questions? Is it actually on the Comcast website so people would know to use it?
There are a lot of different tools popping up in Facebook, like Pariture, which has a customer service tab that you can put on your Facebook profile, or Get Satisfaction just released a full integration with a tab on their Facebook applications. So you can actually go to that tab on Facebook and from there get information from the whole Get Satisfaction website for that specific company. The thing is, because it's relatively new, people are just confused. They don't know where to go or what tool to use to get what they need.
SMT: Your survey was aimed at customers, right? You weren't doing a survey inside of companies?
Amir: We did the survey across a broad range of consumers. We used our entire database, and then we sent it out via social channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter - we just encouraged people to share it inside the company and outside the company so that we could get that broad range of users.
SMT: Not so long ago, when you bought a product or a service, you would probably have a phone number to call with a phone tree to navigate, which is still the case for many situations. So I must be spoiled to complain about all of the available options today. But still it can be confusing, and like you said, it's a fractured marketplace where companies have to be covered on so many different service channels. And with the arrival of Google Plus there is yet again one more major channel to cover. So a company has to be present in many different places at once.
Amir: You're right, and on top of all the different tools out there, every industry has different regulations. For example, you can contact your local utility over Facebook or Twitter, if they have an account, and put in a zip code and ask, "Is there an outage in my area?" and get a quick answer, which is the same thing you might be able to do through their IVR and self service, but it's harder when you have to deal with a bank.
Things are confidential, with more private content that you don't want to expose to a social channel. And companies have to figure out how to deal with that, and not only that, but companies need to know how to tie it back in, so the whole notion of Social CRM, where you can tie in a social channel interaction with the rest of the CRM data that you have about a customer, that's another market that's exploding out there, because companies are trying to figure out how to tie it all in.
But like I'm saying, that's not even enough. If somebody wants to pay a bill - let's say a telecomm service customer - and they get an email, that's one interaction.
They click the button on the email to go to the website and they can't log in - that's a second interaction.
They open up a chat window and the chat agent says they can't help them because there's an issue with their credit card and they don't expose credit cards through the chat, that's another interaction.
They have to call the 800 number, go through the automated system, go through a routing system, go to a live agent who talks to them - we're talking about 10 interactions. And that's not including customer satisfaction surveys that come after that. And that final tweet or Facebook post that the customer puts up, saying, "I had the worst experience paying my bill. I'm not going to pay them another bill in my life."
And so, you look at all that and say, "This is a really bad bill-pay interaction! How many more of my 50 million customers are having exactly the same kind of interaction with me?" And it's not that little siloed interaction. It's not how many people have to click the button to pay the bill. But how many people got an email, clicked the button and went through this whole 10 interactions with me. And that's what ClickFox does. That's what we do. And that's why we give companies this kind of visibility.
SMT: Yes, it's another headache because you not only need to provide the service, you have to learn how to listen and where to listen, and what to listen for. Not to mention that the social media world is fast changing and constantly changing. It must be quite a challenge for businesses.
Amir: Luckily we don't have too much noise in our social channels where we can't handle it yet. All the social engagement and social listening and analytics tools that are out there are going to be necessary for every company and they need to tie that all in to the rest of the customer experiences.