I’m an early adopter and passionate advocate of Social Media. It’s part of my job (but primarily it’s because I like this stuff) to help customer service executives be aware, read, and follow some of the best thinkers in this area. This is a few weeks old I admit, however, but there were good takeaways from a SXSW panel on customer service in a 140 character world (e.g Twitter) that I wanted to share.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang (by the way, you should be following & reading this guy, he’s doing smart work in the social media space) for the heads up on this panel, which included customer service representatives from Comcast, Microsoft, and HP. Disclosure, the Council works with some of these organisations.

Five Key Takeaways:

1. Don’t necessarily address the voices of the loudest or most popular bloggers first  >>  Sometimes a major service problem from a small-time blogger is more important that a minor issue with a social media influencer.
2. Using Twitter and Social Media in general is underpinned by transparent, two-way dialogues between customers and customer service representatives BUT it doesn’t always mean saying yes to the customer.The Council’s current 2010 research, being debuted this week in D.C., will in part explore how customer service organisations avoid “NO” when trying to build a “low effort” customer experience. For more on how low effort relates to improved customer loyalty and how social media can be a way to reduce customer effort, see this post by Microsoft’s Toby’s Richard (who was one of the individuals on the SXSW panel).
3. Is Social Media scalable?  >>  Yes, because there are both free (like CCC-24/7 tweetview) and paid listening tools that help organisations gather compelling customer verbatim, which is more powerful than the tons of metrics and traditional reports that customer service organisations create and share with other business units. Plus, not every customer is talking about your company via Social Media so these listening services help you pinpoint where you are being talked about.
4. Does Social Media reward customers by making people think the best way to get support is to yell & complain to their friends?  >>  People were yelling about customer service long before Social Media gave them a more global platform to share their experiences. By responding in the open, in real-time, however, we can address and solve customer service issues transparently for that that particular customers and for the rest of the customer base to see. Ultimately, we can change some of these people into advocates, one of the three pillars of customer loyalty.
5. Is there a dissonance between the level of customer service received via Twitter versus more traditional channels (phone, web, IVR, email, etc.)?  >>  Using Twitter in the customer service realm is not about amassing the most number of followers or how many emails we send, it’s about measuring the number of customers we help and showing that to executives. Second, it’s using that customer feedback from Social Media to make real improvements, hopefully at the root-cause level, to our customer experience to boost satisfaction and loyalty. Those process improvements affect all channels, not just those customers connecting with customer service via Twitter.

These were the nuggets I gleaned from the panel discussion but let me know what I missed, overstated, or glossed over.

My next post will address this Harvard Business Review post on the Social Media bubble and whether the relationships customer service builds with customers, via Social Media, are indeed deep-value or thin-value relationships.

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For CCC members, we have lots of valuable Social Media resources but those looking for a quick introduction on getting started should read this short primer (Getting Started in Social Media, Managing Social Media Staff, Driving Positive & Secure Social Media Interactions, and Success Metrics and ROI).

Related posts:

1. Twitter: Real VOC or Squeaky Wheel?