Do your customers 'Like' you?

Companies are marrying customer service with social media, using the likes of Facebook and Twitter as public and easily accessible avenues for customer support. Is this new movement for every business? And how do you get started? Andrew Collins reports.

Customer service seems to be the flavour of the month. And not all tongues are reporting a positive taste.

First up we have ACMA’s Reconnecting the Customer inquiry (discussed by Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton in this very magazine, on page tk), which revealed the unsurprising news that many Australian telecoms customers are unhappy with how they’re treated by their service providers. ACMA plans to coerce these unruly telcos into behaving in a more civil manner.

Then we have research from callcentres.net and IBM claiming that almost a third of Australian businesses don’t have a customer service strategy, thanks mainly to limitations of a human resources or budgetary nature.

Taking these statistics at face value, it may seem Australian companies aren’t much for customer service.

Lastly, looking abroad, analyst firm Ovum reports that increasing numbers of Chinese consumers are using social networking tools to contact customer service departments.

According to the firm’s latest stats, the number of Chinese consumers that use social media to contact customer service has almost doubled over the last two years (30% up from 17%).

This statistic is interesting, and may be indicative of a worldwide movement towards using social media for customer service. Luckily there are several local social media experts that can tell us what the picture is like in Australia.

A local outlook

Simply put, consumers in Australia aren’t using social media as a channel for customer service in the same numbers as consumers in China.

This is at least in part because, in Australia, there’s a clear division in the use of social media between consumers and businesses. Guy Cranswick, analyst at IBRS, points to a May 2011 report from Sensis, based on data from 803 Australian customers and 1944 Australian businesses.

The report found that Australian consumers are particularly keen on social media: a large majority (62%) of internet users were found to have a presence on social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn).

But while Australian consumers show great enthusiasm for social media, businesses have yet to follow suit. According to the Sensis report, only 14% of small businesses, 25% of medium-sized businesses and 50% of large businesses have a social media presence.

“Users are getting information from Facebook, and recommendations, but businesses seem slower to mobilise and harness the social channel,” Cranswick says.

Despite these stats on current adoption, Greg Joy, VP of Asia Pacific, Lithium Technologies - a company that provides social CRM solutions - reckons Australian organisations are getting on board.

“Australian companies have begun to make the move to a social CRM environment,” Joy says.

“It is often said that Australia is 18 months to two years behind the United States in the area of social media for customer service. That may be true in the area of installed social media support sites [but] adoption rate is much faster than in the US. In 18 months to two years, Australia will be way ahead of where the US is now,” he says.

The need for socialisation

Opinion is mixed on how swiftly companies should act in establishing a social media presence.

IBRS’s Cranswick says “there is little urgency” and that companies should “test, test and test again to evaluate assumptions, and to clarify abilities to move into social media”.

Lithium Technologies’ Joy, on the other hand, suggests that timeliness is of the essence. To drive the point home, he suggests that companies consider what their market rivals are doing.

“If they aren’t embracing social media, their competitors probably are. Thinking about whether a company should add social media today can be compared to 10 years ago when companies were trying to decide if they should have a website,” he says.

Social media strategist Laurel Papworth believes there’s great benefit in setting up a social media customer service channel.

“Imagine this: a client speaks negatively about you publicly, perhaps tweets that they ‘hate’ your company and XYZ widget is useless. Responding and fixing the issue publicly both improves your standing with the client, the client’s network and maybe strangers, and educates others that have the same issue how to fix/interact with you to get it fixed,” Papworth says.

“That saves time and money. Fixing it over the phone, privately on email or in a store does little for your brand’s social currency,” she says.

According to Cranswick, the need to move into social media depends greatly on a business’s specific niche and its customer demographics.

Speaking of the use of social media in Australia, he says: “There is also huge bias in age [towards the young] and sector interest [towards retail]. That can mean it’s not worthwhile to scale efforts online for smaller users groups; or that it will take time for older and more complex product groups to show up.

“It will depend on the business and industry, and whether there is a momentum in the industry to move into social media,” Cranswick says. “Take stock of where things are and where they might head to build the strategy.”

Lithium’s Joy also sees different rates of return for different sectors, saying, “Consumer-oriented companies see the quickest benefit and are the first to adopt social media support sites.

“As for types of businesses, it is really across the board. We see hardware, software, telecommunications and retail leading the way,” he says.

And while B2C companies may see a return sooner, Papworth says B2B companies also have a lot to gain.

“I do have a client who only has three customers (very specialised business!) but they are still interested in monitoring how they are talked about online,” she says.

Joy suggests that companies that are small or newly formed actually have an advantage when it comes to developing a social media channel for customer service; they haven’t made an investment into an existing large, traditional customer service operation, so starting a social strategy is relatively much easier.

“Small/new companies [Â…] can use social media for the majority of their customer support. If the company is new, they can launch their social media as a primary source of support rather than a large established company that would launch social media as a secondary channel,” Joy says.

He tells of one small but growing UK telco, Giffgaff, that doesn’t have a call centre. Its customer support consists of a web forum, where customer queries are answered by other users.

Conversation starters

Before you do anything else, you must give thought to the communications skills of your staff. You should be very careful when choosing the people to lead and implement your social media strategy.

“Even before selecting the solution – ie, Facebook or others - ensure that the skills and abilities are in the organisation,” IBRS’ Cranswick says. “It requires more than a technology expertise, or some familiarity with social media, or being under 25 years old. It’s about communications.”

This is an important point. You may have a brilliant Gen Y programmer, one who could code their own Facebook from the ground up in an afternoon, and who has intimate knowledge of quirky internet culture - but if they don’t have the right temperament for communication, and for fostering the growth of a community of people, they may end up hindering your social media efforts.

Papworth has a similar line of thought, saying: “I recommend that companies find their most chatty, friendly, staff member (the one that laughs too loudly and is too dynamic) and put them in social media customer service. That way they can bring their customer service knowledge to the channel, with a bright friendly personality attached!”

These matters of a human variety out of the way, you can move on to implementing a social media strategy.

“Do a social media audit first,” Papworth says. Find out “what is loved/hated/already being discussed online and where”.

“Then set up a great monitoring tool - figure out where your customers are,” she adds.

This second step may require a good deal of thought, particularly if you’re only aiming to get your feet wet, and trying to identify which social network will give the greatest payoff for the least effort - the ‘low hanging fruit’ of social media.

“Facebook seems obvious because it has such a large membership, but be aware that not all members are the same,” Cranswick says, referring here to the often overlooked demographics of Facebook.

Cranswick explains in his research note, The Facebook Fandango: “In Australia, Facebook’s audience is: young, poor, not highly educated and under/unemployed.”

So if you work for a charity that targets wealthy singles with endless disposable incomes, or a retirement village that houses folks over the age of 80, your audience may not be well represented in the Facebook population. Don’t let large user numbers blind you.

“Facebook still really only does well with entertainment and gaming. Evidence on other sectors is much less convincing,” Cranswick says.

“Twitter is probably more hyped because it’s used by many in media, but has little mass reach,” Cranswick warns.

The bottom line: think about your customers, which social networks they can be found on, and how they might want to interact with you.

“Then train your staff - customer service in an online community is very different than traditional customer service. You become long-term friends with customers, they talk about their marriages and divorces, they get married, have babies, die on your customer service sites!” Papworth says.

Becoming a renowned socialite

Once you’ve established some social networking beachheads, you should focus on specific metrics to help determine your next steps.

According to Cranswick, you should look at “if and how often [your social media channel] is used - not whether it’s all good news, that is, if customers say good things about the brand”.

Lithium’s Joy has a similar perspective, saying: “Success is repeat visitors. Getting regulars to come to a site - whether it is Facebook or a forum - is step one. This is the process of building critical mass. Once they have these regulars they can begin to build content which will be used by other users and be indexed by search engines.”

There are a bevy of technology options available to help understand how you’re doing in this social realm.

“The right social media tools can provide companies and brands ‘sentiment monitoring’,” Papworth says.

So once you fix a customer problem and report this publicly through your social media channels, you can use these tools to see if your public sentiment increases in response. If not, you might be doing something wrong.

Overall, Cranswick counsels patience, emphasising the long-term nature of these social media initiatives.

“Don’t abandon efforts that have worked even partially, as they may grow over time. It’s a two-way dialogue and so it might develop with some modifications and listening to what customers want,” Cranswick says.

“Give it time, because it will take up to a year to really work with customers, and for them to realise that the company is serious about this,” he says.

“After all, many customers have mixed memories of online promise, and that collective scepticism is carried forward, so each initiative like social media must work to maintain confidence.”

Images courtesy of iStockphoto