Are social channels a help or hindrance to your customer service offering?

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One of the main topics of conversation in a lot of our client meetings currently is the use of social media within their businesses.

There are some clients, who have naturally tapped into this resource and see it as an ideal way of engaging and inspiring their customers to follow their brands.

They put up promotions and goodies to entice people in and crank up the followers, but are they really doing enough to listen to the actual conversation that is taking place?

Spreading the word

The use of these channels is becoming more and more pivotal in terms of not perhaps just encouraging consumers to follow brands now, but to actually evolve society.

Take the recent riots; it is perhaps unknown how much they were impacted by channels such as Twitter and YouTube, but certainly the police used those very same channels to post CCTV shots of offenders, even putting up live screens in city centres with the content.

It's clear that these channels cannot be ignored and the use of them can immediately create fans or enemies.

Are you listening?

People with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.

So, are your customer service channels really tapping into the comments and feeds on the social networks? And can you satisfy yourself as a business that you are listening in and responding accordingly?

This can be a minefield! What is the correct or indeed acceptable response time and how and who should be tasked with this role? If someone took the time to write a letter of complaint and posted it, would it receive more or less attention than that of a negative comment on Twitter or perhaps posted in your Facebook Group?

Managing the outcome

How much faster and to how many more viewers can this negativity be seen? Have you asked yourself these questions? In our experience, companies often spend a fortune on generating positive PR activity whether it be on or offline but how much time and budget is being spent looking at the negative threads that can be out there?

Every brand gets some negative feedback now and again right? So what? You still have a lot of happy customers. Attitudes like this can be like suicide to your brand.

Some businesses choose to just ignore bad comment - or worse still - delete them! Today's consumer is smart and savvy and will notice. If you deal with these comments quickly, efficiently and publicly you will probably end up looking better than if had you remained apathetic.

At bpi. we have successfully helped many clients unravel this intricate matter which, in our opinion, really should be handled with care. If you want to guarantee your fan base grows through these channels and it doesn't become the window to the world for complaints then we can help you to plan, design and implement the right strategy.

Managing the platforms, linking them in to your customer service team and training your staff how to effectively deal with these streams is vital to your business going forward.

We would be really happy to come in for a free consultation as we believe this is truly business critical and should be high on your agenda.

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