Do brands undervalue using Social Media for customer service?

What would your company use social media for? Everyone else is doing it, generating leads, spreading awareness, building a community and how about customer service? Find out if brands undervalue using Social Media for Customer Service below: According to a survey conducted by Alterian, few companies are utilising social media channels for customer-service objectives. Results reflected that when asked about the most important social media objectives to a company, 24% reported that the central objective is retaining existing customers, 26% believe that the most crucial objective is driving brand awareness and 30% are aiming for new customer acquisition. 1.2% cited that their most important objective is to offer customer service. "It's surprising that brands are reporting that they don't highly value deploying customer service in the social media channel," said David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian. "Many are under utilizing this approach, as all brands need to be prepared to handle their customers' complaints and act on them. While marketers may have different objectives than those working in the customer service department, it's important to have a cross-channel strategy and integrate outreach to gain maximum exposure and positive chatter about your brand online." Cross-Channel coordination is still needed Although their is lack of emphasis on customer service as an objective in social media, the survey results showed that about 90% of marketers believe that cross-channel coordination is indeed vital in marketing campaigns. Similarly, a whopping 61% of marketers said their brand's engagement with consumers occurs both online and offline, suggesting that engagement takes place on multiple platforms. Social Media engagement Based on survey results, marketers said they are increasingly viewing social media as a means for engagement as opposed to promotion. Three out of four respondents (74.8%) say their brand is either 'somewhat' or 'extremely' engaged in social media. Roughly 25.3% percent reported they are not very engaged, and three percent said they are not engaged at all with social media. Measuring ROI Yet the survey showed that measuring ROI is still a challenge. 37% of respondents said they are not able to measure ROI when it comes to the socialization of their brand, and 42% reported to be only somewhat able to measure ROI. Some marketers might be on the fence about ROI, the majority (57 percent) said they believe investing in social media has been a worthwhile investment for their brand. 35% claimed it's still too early to tell. Not one respondent reported that social media is not a worthwhile investment. "There are tools available today that help marketers measure the influence of their social media investment, and consequently understand the ROI for their social media efforts," said Connie Bensen, Alterian's Director of Community Strategy. "It's just a matter of identifying what you want to measure and tracking progress in a way that is appropriate for your brand." Reducing company costs Helping customers directly via social media is a great way to reduce costs! What’s the cost of a customer service call versus the cost of helping a customer via social networks? Also, as you begin to use social media to provide customer service, customers begin to help each other out by pointing you out to anyone that has problems. Here’s a few examples of companies that are using social media to lower customer service costs: InfusionSoft: The company provides web-based marketing automation software to small businesses. The company decided to create a community site to help customers better use the software, but InfusionSoft saw that the majority of the customers had customer service issues. So the company shifted gears a bit, and used the site to help customers with their problems. The company reports that in 2 years time it’s gone from having one customer service agent for every 55 customers (with a 77% customer satisfaction rating), to as of early this year having 1 agent for every 172 customers, and a 87% satisfaction rating. Cisco: The company needed a way to better organize product information/expert sources for Account Managers so they could handle issues for customers. The company created the Specialist Optimization and Results (SOAR) initiative, which brings the company’s vast knowledge base together in one location that can be easily accessed by Account Managers. It includes access to ‘virtual experts’, discussion forums, and marketing materials. The results the company has seen from this initiative include: Every 100 specialists can now do the work of 120, saving the company $5 million a year. Travel expense for Cisco product specialists are down by as much as 60 percent in teams using SOAR tools, and specialists report saving 17 hours a week on average, and boosting their productivity by 22%. Pitney Bowes: PB also utilizes company-backed forum to provide customer service (noting a trend here?). One interesting aspect is that the staff constantly monitor the forum for customer issues, but will wait a minimum of 24 hours before responding. They do this for two reasons: First, to give them time to properly research the problem and give the customer a better answer. And second, to give their fellow customers time to help out the other customer and offer advice. Obviously, you need a strong community in place to make the latter feasible. Results? The company estimates that every 5 visits to a specific question on the forum, or every 25 visits to a general post averts a customer service call, and that Pitney Bowes has averted a total of 30,000 calls to their customer service centers. At a cost of $10 per call, that means a total savings of $300,000. Thanks to Mike Hardy from Pitney Bowes for clarifying that in the comments. He added this: “While we don’t generally share hard numbers about our performance, I can say that we met all of our first year’s expenses, including startup, within 6 weeks of launching our forum.” Conclusion The study found that only 1.2% of brands surveyed utilise Social Media for customer service. In South Africa particularly, one only has to look at how seriously our brands take tools like Hello Peter to understand the value of engaging with customers in their domain on a customer service level. If taken seriously customer service through Social media can not only help build your community but save costs too.