More and more customer service inquiries are posed to brands through social media. Why, then, do 96% of brands focus solely on advertising and public relations with their social media strategy?
The following thought starters will arm you with the ideas necessary to sell the idea of social media customer care to your company’s decision makers.
Customer Care grounds social media in the most profitable phase of the social media purchase funnel. This is a key differentiator between the marketing or public relations functions of social media, which only service the awareness / upper-funnel elements of the purchase process. The following infographic shows how all three elements are necessary to fully service social media – The Brand, The Agency, and The Brand Care Contact Center:
How the client, brand agency, and customer care center fit together to service consumers in social media.
Social Media Customer Care: Key Differentiators
Customer Care Focus– Who better to service the customer at 60-70 engagements per agent per hour than a full-time, dedicated customer service representative? These Brand Care Specialists can be specialized to both serve the inbound customer support needs of your brand pages, as well as proactively upsell and prospect for your brand with an outbound customer engagement mentality.
Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies focus on big-splashes, missing the boat on individual customer care solutions, and lacking the staffing, infrastructure, and know-how to fully engage the customer in a sustainable manner.
Brand Knowledge & Safety – At Global Response, we commit to learning, living, and breathing your brand. All agent touch points fully represent your brand in the way that you want it represented. Also, our internal team is structured with the requisite tools and processes to prevent on-page slipups that can damage brand credibility.
Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies don’t perform the level of ongoing training needed to keep their interns up-to-speed on where your brand is headed. Most agencies just throw more interns at the problem, with no more structure than a basic knowledge of Facebook – which can lead to service level problems on your pages.
Optimization & Constant Contact – Global Response’s Brand Care teams establish best-practices and ongoing optimization processes for serving the customer, escalating problem issues to the proper party – client side – and keeping the dialogue going until a negative experience is turned into a brand evangelist.
Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies do not and cannot perform this constant optimization process to better serve your page. The mentality for your presence is, “Set it and forget it” where all problem interactions are dumped on the client point of contact to sort out, without recommendations or proactive response.
Man Power & Sustainability – Over time, internal social media management teams fall apart. Key individuals either leave the company or are promoted to another role, and the knowledge gained with that team is lost. With an outsourced contact center, those relationships are sustained year after year, consistently bringing the highest level of customer service to your customers with no down time or gaps.
Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies hire interns to act in this role – which means that their teams fall apart every semester and cannot be sustained.
Efficiencies – By outsourcing your social media customer care to a contact center, you will be able to maximize the efficiency of your current agents, putting them to work and saving you money overall. If you have agents answering phones and chats, but still have 15 minutes remaining in a given hour, your agents’ downtime can be best used to monitor and engage on your social presences.
Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies are not built for customer service; asking them to do so is like asking them to reinvent the wheel. It is unrealistic and inefficient for them to perform actions that they are not used to performing and staffing for needs that they are not used to staffing. Agent utilization isn’t even a concept that would cross a marketers mind.
For many businesses, the social media component is a critical element for their Contact center. Since a customer care contact center is an extension of the brand, social media is an extension of the service. It is one more form of interaction that today’s public recognizes.
Global Response helps clients listen to social media and respond promptly and professionally to customer support issues. For Contact centers, like many other businesses, it’s a new norm – but it will be considered traditional and standard as the marketplace continues to evolve.