The Social Customer Care Gap

Companies and Social Care

It has been 8 years since Canadian musician Dave Carroll made his customer complaint with United Airlines very public by creating a YouTube video United Breaks Guitars and launching the first, great social customer care #fail.

Almost a decade later companies appear sanguine about the risk of a similar dip in share price, expensive public relationship blunders or simply being exposed on social networks for evidently poor customer service. In a 2016 state-of-the-nation report with contributions from customer care thought leaders the overriding view is that businesses have only recently begun to recognize the need for social customer care. They are lagging significantly behind their customers. There is a social customer care gap.

And it shows. Companies are, in the main, barely adequate when it comes to their most public customer exchanges. According to Northridge Group, a US CX consulting firm, the channel that disappoints customers the most is social. Shockingly social was ranked lowest in a list that included postal mail. According to data from Jay Baer, author of Hug Your Haters only 40% of complaints made on social media are even addressed.

Customers and Social Care

Carroll was a single voice and went to extraordinary lengths to get even over an act of corporate carelessness. Today, with mobile access, customers can tweet or post in the moment and it is becoming the new normal for grumbling. According to the Institute of Customer Service there was an eight-fold increase in social customer complaints between 2014 and 2015. They also discovered that a quarter of social media users had used the channel to complain over the previous three months. It’s their device, their platform and they are shouting at ever increasing volumes.

Closing the Gap

So how do businesses catch-up with their customers. What should they be doing to close the social customer care gap?

#1 Assume Social First

Social is no longer the channel of last resort for when customers want to shout or vent. It is a hugely convenient way to communicate so it is becoming the touchpoint of choice even before picking up the phone.

This means supporting social all-day and every day. Social customer care is not an initiative, rather it is at the core of customer service. Businesses are increasingly staffing outside of office hours and it is not just companies such as airlines and transport that are expected to respond 24 x 7 anymore.

#2 Be Responsive

Expectations on social have not stood still. Whilst once delighted with a mere response, customers now want resolution. You might was well ask them to fax their complaint as redirect them to your call centre or chat queue.

And, according to a report from Edison, they want it quick. A significant proportion, 42% want to hear back in an hour and almost a third expected this to be half that. Consistent with our suggestion that social is becoming the principal channel, more than half of customers expect the same response times in the evenings and on weekends. And many of the businesses I interact with are working towards 15 minutes on Facebook and Twitter and even shorter response times on social messaging platforms.

#3 Integrate

Social started it’s life in most businesses with the marketing department. It was mistakenly thought of as a new broadcast channel. Meanwhile customer services teams have been treated like cost-centers with limited access to the rest of the business and tightly controlled by process and policy.

This has changed. In an era where businesses are differentiating themselves on the quality of the customer experience all departments need to contribute to social customer care and your customer services responses are an opportunity to stand out. To respond quickly and decisively to customer problems, processes must be able to reach right inside the business to engineers, designers, managers and executives.

The process may start with and be professionally coordinated by customer services but

rapid resolution can often require collaboration from the entire company.

#4 Stop Faking; Everyone is Watching

For some firms, the initial response to social was to either be defensive of its public nature or to grandstand occasional examples of good customer care to promote their brand. This is no more than pretending and can quickly turn into a public relations disaster.

Most businesses however recognize that good service has always been good business. People are willing to pay more for excellent service. In fact, according to an American Express study, more than two thirds of US consumers would pay upwards of ten percent more. Progressive businesses have always conducted their affairs as if everyone is watching so now that they really are, they are leading the way because they have always had a culture of doing the right thing.

#5 Be Where Your Customers Are

In his book The Intention Economy, David ‘Doc’ Searls predicts a future where customers control economic activity rather than companies. Searls predicts the growth of vendor relationship management (VRM) over customer relationship management (CRM) technology. In short Searls asserts that your customers are in control and are determining where, when and how businesses engage with them. It is critical to determine where your customers are to identify which specific social channels you service.

It is likely that Facebook and Twitter are only starting points but if your customers are trying to reach you on LinkedIn, Instagram or Snapchat you must be there too.

Mind The Gap

The social gap is only going to widen. Customers are weary of hold music, telephone queues and of being ping-ponged between agents. They are never going to let go of their new-found control and convenience. Social customer care is not just here to stay. It will continue to grow and dominate the way in which your customers connect with each other and with the companies that serve them.

It is time for companies to accelerate their social customer care initiatives and to catch-up with their customers. Otherwise, as Jack Welch once said ‘When the rate of change outside the organization exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is near’.

Sources

http://www.northridgegroup.com/images/files/file/Form-Protected/NRG-Whitepaper-The-State-of-Customer-Service-2015.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/may/21/customer-complaints-social-media-rise

http://billiesastre.com/trends-2016/

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7378-good-customer-service.html

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