Improving the Customer Experience Using Social Networks
16 Jun, 2010
By: Christopher HallWith four out of five Americans now using social networks, the era of exchanging public knowledge has clearly arrived, creating significant implications for enterprises.
Social media has opened up a world of possibilities in terms of how people interact with online content. In the process, customers’ expectations have fundamentally changed. Customers increasingly expect to get access to contextually relevant information through methods of their choosing - such as the web, email, live chat, and phone, as well as emerging social channels such as discussion forums, Facebook and Twitter. This proves to be particularly true during unpredictable events, such as recalls or service issues, when a company’s web traffic, contact center interactions and general service inquires skyrocket. Being able to provide quicker, more informative answers to customer questions is valuable during this high-volume time.
The Stick and the Carrot
The customer is always right. If there had been any doubt about the truth of that adage, the social networking paradigm has eliminated it completely. While delivering a satisfying experience has always been important, social networks are making that endeavor more vital than ever. Social networks represent both a stick and a carrot in incenting customer service improvements.
The stick? They can dramatically exacerbate the impact of a customer service failure, giving dissatisfied customers a means to publicly vent their frustrations, and, in the process spread negative impressions that can reduce trust, loyalty and sales.
The carrot? By effectively engaging with customers through social networks, organizations can foster unparalleled loyalty and gain invaluable insights that can improve not only customer service, but quality assurance, product road maps and marketing—all while building brand equity.
For those organizations that are plotting their initial foray into the social world, or that are early in the execution of their social networking initiatives, what are some of the key ground rules for social network engagement? In short, enterprises have a lot to gain by embracing this paradigm, and a lot to lose if they don’t.
If Ignored, Social Networks Won’t Go Away, but Customers Might
In a very short time, social networks have fundamentally changed the way many customers expect to interact with businesses. In recent years, if a customer had a support question, they’d typically refer to the support site, and, if the answer wasn’t easy to find, call the contact center. Now, if a customer goes to the company’s support site or customer forum and doesn’t quickly get the answer they need, they’ll search elsewhere to see if others have encountered the same issue.
Given the explosive proliferation and usage of social networks, these venues are increasingly where people searching for answers end up. When a customer makes this move away from company-sponsored sites, the company can be completely removed from the discussion, and irrevocably lose control and visibility over that interaction. In some cases, a company may get lucky, and the customer may find a useful answer on an external site that helps address the issue. Even then, however, the company loses an opportunity to foster a relationship, capture valuable knowledge and eventually these customers become accustom to going elsewhere when they need answers.
In a more troubling scenario, the customer may stumble upon an external forum filled with accounts of product and/or support issues that are yet to be resolved—and worse, the appropriate individuals at the company may not even be aware of the forum and the prevalence of these issues. In this case, the potentially harmful nature of social networks can be in full effect, creating a very public, very long term and very damaging impression of the company for a great number of people.
Create a Vibrant Customer Forum—If Not Today, Yesterday
No one likes to reinvent the wheel. That’s why, when we as consumers run into questions or issues, it’s our natural inclination to see if others have run into the same issue and what they did to resolve it. Given this, a company-sponsored customer forum or “gated community” can be a great new focal point for customers as they seek to get questions answered.
If you create a vibrant customer forum, your organization will gain a lot of near-term and long-term benefits. Specifically, these forums are where a lot of customers would start when they need answers. The better experience they have there, the more likely they are to repeatedly engage with your organization in that venue.
Don’t Treat Social Networks as a Silo
One of the tremendous opportunities presented by social network engagement is that, by participating in community conversations, organizations can gain a wealth of insights—insights that can be leveraged to foster improvements in product development, quality control, marketing and other areas of the business as well. Following are some keys to making the most of these insights.
Engaging with customers in forums and other social sites is a critical first step in terms of starting a dialog. Organizations that treat these social interactions separately from the rest of their organization’s support and communication channels will be significantly limiting the potential benefits to be derived from social networks. On the other hand, by broadly leveraging these conversations, you can ultimately improve the customer experience in all interactions with and about your organization.
The answers that arise from community conversations can be incubators of knowledge that can be fed not only into future forum conversations, but also into other support channels, such as Web self service and contact centers. As a result, a search on a Web self-service portal can yield relevant discussion topics. Likewise, new relevant solutions and articles from support can be linked from or referenced in applicable community conversations. This content, coupled with sophisticated natural language search capabilities, can ultimately yield improvements in customer experiences across all support channels.
Integrate with Knowledge Management
Having a strong knowledge management infrastructure in place is critical when attempting to engage in new social media. Namely, if a support organization is drawing from multiple, disjointed knowledge bases, agents have difficulty getting the answers they need to resolve customer issues, and Web self-service channels aren’t delivering satisfactory interactions, adding social networks into the mix may only exacerbate these issues.
Having a knowledge-centric approach to social media is vital for businesses to capitalize on these public interactions. Social communities thrive on the exchange of knowledge. Public experts are established through community generated reputations and a new generation of crowd-sourced knowledge is emerging. By leveraging a knowledge-centric approach, organizations are best equipped to incubate social information and leverage this same information to develop responses, and ensure all users can quickly and easily get the answers they need.
Strengthening Customer Relationships through Engagement
The proliferation of social networks has presented enterprises with a huge opportunity, a new way to communicate with and learn from customers, in a fashion that they have embraced and are accustomed to. By interacting with customers in this way, organizations can realize significant improvements, not only in customer service, but also in product development, quality assurance, marketing, and virtually every other area of a business. By taking a strategic, knowledge-based approach, organizations can fully leverage the potential of social networks to truly enhance the customer experience and improve business performance in a range of areas.
