In June of this year we conducted a survey of the community. Our goal was to get a better understanding of how TSC members felt their companies were doing with respect to utilizing social tools and strategies to improve customer service. We thought it would be a good first step in gauging where companies are today in this area, and to share our findings with the TSC community as another source of information we hoped would be helpful.
The results of that first survey were released back in September in the whitepaper The Social Customer Engagement Index - Survey Results, Insights and Perspectives. Some of the high-level findings of the initial survey showed that companies that saw positive results from "social" customer service had a number of things in common:
- They had been interacting with customers over social channels for over two years
- They have integrated social tools and strategies into their traditional customer service processes, not just using "social" as a standalone channel
- They had actual customer service professional interacting with customers over social channels, not just marketing and pr professionals
- They communicate with customers over multiple social networks, Facebook and Twitter leading the way
- They had management buy-in from the very top
Please feel free to download the free whitepaper (registration required) to see the detailed results.
With it being approximately six months from the time of the first survey, and based on the response we received from the whitepaper, we thought it would be a good time to ask the community how things are progressing with their social customer service initiatives.
We'd love for you to help us by taking a short follow-up survey so we can tell you what's changed, what's the same, and what trends are taking place in how companies are leveraging social tools from a customer service perspective. Many of the questions are similar to the first survey, but we've also added a few new ones based off of feedback we received from you.
For those who took the survey before, we'd love to have you participate again. And if you didn't take the first survey, please don't let it stop you from taking this one. We'd love to have your experiences included in the next set of results. The more experiences we can include will help the TSC community improve their chances to successfully serve today's social customers. This is a major reason why we are happy to partner with The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP) again. Additionally, we are also very happy that The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is asking their membership to participate in this survey.
With the communities of SOCAP and SNCR participating in the survey, we should have some great information to provide back to the TSC community early in the new year. And, as with the first whitepaper, we also will include additional perspectives and analysis to go with the detailed results of the survey. So please take a few minutes to take the online survey. You can use this link to do so, and we promise it will only take a few minutes.
Thank you for helping the TSC community in our efforts to continually provide quality information you can use in your efforts to engage the social customer.