Social media service lessons from the leading brands

 

 

With social media now mainstream for today’s hyper-connected consumers, more contact centres will invest time and resources to understand social media as a customer service channel in 2012. According to analyst firm Gartner, this trend is already under way with at least 35% of customer service centres expected to have some form of social media capability by 2013.

 

 

Recognising the shift in how consumers want to communicate is important, especially in this ‘make or break’ world of customer service. And offering customer support through social media networks, what we call “social care,” might help forward-thinking companies become more responsive, transparent and engaged with their customer base.

 

 

There is already a lot to learn from big brands like Apple, Dell, Google, and Best Buy — companies already offering social care. In our recent white paper, Benchmarking Social Media Customer Service, we examined the strategies of these high-tech leaders over a week: to be included in the analysis, social media posts had to relate to customer service only.

 

 

The results showed that big brands are doing very different things when it comes to social care. Even among high-tech leaders, best practices and consistency across all social channels are just emerging.

 

 

Apple is renowned for its company-branded support communities that are largely consumer driven. The support communities incorporate social networking features such as “liking” an answer and allowing members to earn status credential for the best response. The use of this “game-play” tactic encourages the desired behavior of the community, and works well as a strategy to offload customer support to actual customers.

 

 

Google is another brand taking a proactive, unique approach to social care — using videos to serve customers (which isn’t surprising given that Google bought YouTube back in 2006). With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, using rich media channels like YouTube will play a bigger role in customer support in the years ahead.

 

 

At the time of the study, neither Apple nor Google offered comparable support on the other social care channels – such as Facebook and Twitter. For these channels, companies like HP, Best Buy and Dell take the lead. Whether it’s empowering employees to provide social care (Best Buy’s Twelpforce on Twitter), creating support forums on Facebook with little company involvement (HP), or ensuring a broad social media presence on all social channels (Dell), these companies are establishing their unique online customer service strategies.

 

 

 

 

From the study, it was clear that companies are at the early stages of developing the people, processes and technology to support social care. But even without a consistent approach among the high-tech leaders, best practices are emerging.

 

 

Here are some top practices to consider when launching a social care strategy: