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As companies gain experience, further integrate social into service processes and teams, and align social service strategies more closely with their overall customer engagement strategy, they are seeing more positive impact from their efforts. That’s just one of a number of key takeaways from Social Media Today’s 2014 Social Customer Engagement Index.
The move to provide mobile customer service is accelerating and should continue to do so in the foreseeable future as customers operate more of their personal and professional lives through a plethora of devices, including wearable devices.
Effective resource allocation will continue to be central to social service success as companies continually fight to keep up with customer expectations for better experiences. Optimizing in the face of an ever-changing mix of devices, tools, platforms and technological literacy will only become more challenging, even as experience with social service grows deeper. It’s the nature of the current environment, and it will only accelerate over the next few years, particularly for organizations looking to integrate social from a strategic, process, and team perspective.
Overall, Facebook remains the most used and most effective social channel for customer engagement from a service perspective, but companies who operate their own branded communities find those to be just as important as Facebook and more important than Twitter. Over time, these owned communities should allow companies to build deeper, more intimate relationships with customers, as long as they continue to facilitate peer-to-peer engagement and provide relevant, timely information whenever it is needed.
The survey also found in general that a greater number of service interactions are taking place over social channels. But even as the percentage of social service interactions increases, it still lags far behind traditional service channels like email and phone.
Speed of engagement will play an increasingly important role in creating great customer service experiences, and companies that focus on providing speedy responses on a consistent basis should create win-win scenarios for the customer base and the response times calls for alignment of processes, teams and strategies – and of course a greater percentage of investment dollars being used on the right technology pieces to provide a solid foundation on which to build.
Finally, companies will maximize their odds of social service success if they make sure the strategy is a meaningful, well-connected part of the overall customer experience strategy. To that end, the organization should create a culture that allows that customer experience strategy to grow and stay aligned with customer behaviors, activities and expectations over time.
To get a free copy of the 2014 Social Customer Engagement Index report you can click on this registration link.
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