Many companies are beginning to realize they need to take a more strategic view toward the intelligence they gather from social communities, realizing that this insight not only can transform their approach to customer service, but also support brand health over the long term. As a result, “Social Servicing” – understanding and addressing the needs of customers online and determining how to measure those efforts to make informed decisions as to when and how to invest in additional resources and scale on a global basis – is getting more focus.
Many global brands seeking to support and develop the long-term health of their brand are beginning Social Servicing programs as one of their leading forays into social activation. For most, customer servicing is one of the first business groups within the enterprise to begin social activation. Customer servicing programs can leverage social servicing into the business goals already in place. Most often the most successful programs are created from teams of existing service professionals already well versed at handling customer relations and adding the social channels to the more traditional channels already being serviced layering in social as part of their servicing solution. As businesses establish their online presence through easily recognizable and increasingly active Twitter handles, forum and social channel presences Social Servicing becomes normalized and the opportunity for Social Servicing to expand into new channels and to go beyond one to one customer interaction grows. Over time, this practice becomes increasingly important to the business and its reputation, organizations likely will need to increase the number of staff devoted purely to this function, especially across multiple markets. Customer service professionals are also going to want to have better ways to analyze the influence of each author to understand the bigger picture of their efforts and establish uniform criteria for issue resolution and escalation. To that end integration and usage of API’s is becoming a key component.
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Socialize Your CRM
Posted by Enrico Montana on January 18, 2012A recent eMarketer research study indicates that companies who answer questions on social channels are more attractive to consumers. About 6 out 10 Twitter users would like to have businesses respond to their inquiries on Twitter. Two thirds of these Twitter users also indicated that having a business respond to them on social channels would make them more satisfied and more likely to make a purchase from that business.
Clearly, going the extra mile and proactively reaching out to customers with questions or issues on social channels can have a significant impact. Companies with social servicing programs are often written about, but there are some other applications for CRM such as using social data for lead generation, loyalty programs and a deeper understanding of customers that are also worth considering. Read more…