According to the State of Customer Service Experience 2015 report recently published by The Northridge Group sixty-three percent of consumers have to engage with a brand two or more times on social media before a customer service inquiry or issue is resolved. They have also discovered that one-third of consumers who contact a brand on social media never get a response.
At a time where massive investments are being made in social media by organisations both large and small, the question has to be asked why isn’t the platform working? The promise of social media as a medium to deliver timely and effective customer support has been on the table for several years and has even been advertised by some as their differentiator. Clearly there are some companies out their that have been using platforms as such as twitter, Facebook and home grown ‘social’ apps successfully, but it appears the overwhelming majority has not.
The Northridge Group, who put together the survey are equally surprised by the results, they say:
“Because of the public and real-time nature of social media, this is surprising. Ideally, virtually every customer who reaches out to a company with a customer service issue or inquiry should at least receive prompt acknowledgement.”
They go on to suggest:
“Not only should consumers receive an acknowledgement, but they should receive it in a timely manner. For those customers who do receive a response, they also expect it faster than they get it today.”
Unsurprisingly, the survey found that when faced with an urgent issue, consumers will inevitably revert to what they know and trust and pick up the phone. Seventy-seven percent of the respondees found it much easier to resolve a complex issue when talking directly to customer service representative. They also found that the confidence in same-day resolution was very high at eighty-two percent.
Anyone creating or enhancing a social media strategy, should think in terms of complementing the call centre and not replacing it. Whereas consumers seem to be very comfortable using social media for comments, questions and complaints, they are less comfortable when it comes to problem resolution. One needs only to look at billing information where sensitive data and identity validation is required to see that this can be very difficult over a social media platform.
There are fundamental differences between call centres and social media, they should not compete as a primary customer service platform. However, that does not minimise the importance of this medium as a significant communication channel. Northridge suggests:
“Rather than compete, social media and call centres should complement one another to deliver the most robust, responsive and effortless customer service strategy possible.”
