Tuesday, August 18, 2015 why handing over those social media reins to customer services isn’t going to do comms people out of jobs
Customer services using social media to meet the needs of customers has been a growing trend for some time. But many organisations are still to crack that nut.
by GUEST EDITOR Nicky Speed
Social media tools offer far greater customer insight than we could've imagined even a couple of years ago. We can respond to posts about services, thank customers with immediate replies and give them useful info about the other great things we do. We can even scour sector hashtags for possible issues.
In short, social media is quickly changing what's expected in today's customer service world.
So why are so many organisations still scared to hand over the reins to their customer service teams to operate social media channels?
I had a lively discussion about this subject when I was telling another communications professional about how we had recently handed over the day-today responsibilities of responding to customer enquiries on Twitter to our Traveline team. I was met with an expression of astonishment and a reply of, “do you really trust them to do this? I don’t know whether I could just hand my baby over.”
Okay, so I know this can sound daunting when you have built up a strong social media presence - it’s difficult to let go, especially to people who may know very little about the crafting of great online content. But…these are the same people you trust to pick up the phone and talk to a customer, the same people who would respond to a complaint on email. And ultimately, the customer doesn’t care how well worded your response is on social media, they just want an answer – and quick!
I’m not saying this to make it sound that it is completely irrelevant what we do as communications professionals on social media, because it’s not – far from it. We’re doing some wonderful, creative things out there.
This is why I would argue that giving your customer service teams more responsibility on social media is NOT going to do you out of a job. It actually frees up more time for your comms, marketing and digital teams to focus on more strategic, proactive activities as well as listen and engage more. This is exactly why we’re taking this approach – and we haven’t lost control, we still have complete oversight.
This decision hasn’t been taken purely for selfish reasons. Our approach is actually enhancing customer service and was implemented in response to customer intelligence – they want answers outside the core hours of 9am-5pm. And this is exactly what we are giving them because our Traveline team operates from 7am-8pm and at weekends too.
And anyway, shouldn’t meeting customer needs ultimately be at the heart of what we do? A win-win for all I say.
Nicky Speed is Senior Communications Lead at Mersey Travel
Reader Comments (2)
An interesting post. Whether to have social media primarily managed by customer services or comms must depend on the balance of use by your stakeholders and your corporate SoMe strategy.
I assume you have a lot of transport queries and complaints? If so it seems good comms and customer service sense for these to be dealt with directly by customer services. That is good reputation management - avoiding problems being seen to be undealt with is an open invite to the public, press or stakeholders to have a pop - as well as good customer service.
However, for organisations where customers are not using social media in this way, or where for business seasons you want to direct queries to other channels, it might be better to retain control in comms.
For the record here at the CSP both customer service and comms are part of the same directorate. Our Head of Online is channel lead but we have a distributed system for managing social media including our member comms, press, digital and customer service teams.
What we find difficult is when a customer goes through a traditional channel (call centre/online form) then uses social media to chase. Or, when someone starts their enquiry on social media but our customer services team would prefer it to come in on an online form.
We have (long) customer response times - 25 days we say for some enquiries - and this doesn't wash on social media. 25 minutes is sometimes too long let alone 25 days.
How do we marry up the traditional and the modern channels because at the moment, those customers who use social media to contact us get a quicker response than those who go through customer services, because basically, comms are bypassing the customer services process to get back to 'those who shout loudest' via social media.