Social Customer Support: Much More Than “Social Media Monitoring” Tools.
Providing social customer service and support in today’s multi-channel environment is by no means an easy task. Driven by high volumes of online user generated content, social intelligence is a phenomenon searching for pragmatic, actionable business use cases with clear justification of return on investment. There is no dearth of software and service vendors offering sentiment analysis, twitter analytics, content analytics, and speech analytics tools. Each offers dashboards, drill-downs, graphs or other types of visualization that illustrate metrics for online sentiment analysis (positive, neutral, mixed or negative), such as influencer or net-promoter scores, share of voice, volume, product quality issues, crisis management, share price cause and effect or media and brand reach.
Some software vendors offer sentiment analysis to classify and prioritize customer conversations by topic, issue or sentiment prior to agents opening their work-queue. Others deploy text analytics and business process rules to route these conversations by urgency, issue, topic and/or suggested corrective action or opportunity to the appropriate agent based upon expertise in handling certain issues.
Figure 1: Top Drivers for Investment in Social Media
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Across all industry sectors and business models—B2B, B2C and the marketing two-step B2B2C–businesses strive to know more about their customers. How old are they, where do they live, what channels of communication do they prefer and why? What products, services and content interest them, and what influences them to purchase or recommend certain products or brand?
Most importantly, organizations want to know, how do we harness this exploding phenomenon of user-generated content, commonly known as “social media” in order to supply superior customer service and support? The complexity of harnessing this rich treasure-trove of customer information in today’s highly commoditized[1] global marketplace presents challenges as well as opportunities for businesses seeking to foster higher levels of customer intimacy in order to engage, retain and to realize full customer lifetime value.
Bottom-line: Social Customer Support: Much More Than “Social Media Monitoring” Tools.
[1]Excelling in customer service and support is often the key advantage in a highly commoditized and competitive marketplace.