We’re well past any notion of social media as an “emerging” tool for business. As Aberdeen recently reported in its study of social customer care, social channels are here to stay.
Social care is the new norm, with 70% of businesses estimated to be using social for customer service by mid-2014.
Today’s customers have the ability to educate themselves on products and services, as well as talk to friends and family about their experiences with a company. Companies can join those conversations by being active on social media and connecting with customers when there are issues.
Where businesses can differentiate themselves, however, is by focusing on those activities that best-in-class companies do to provide truly outstanding customer care. Aberdeen surveyed 289 firms. The top 20% of those companies—in terms of customer retention rates and yearly improvement—shared a number of key practices that helped them reach the top:
- Identify the most relevant social media portals that they need to use to monitor and engage with customers.
- Automatically take key insights and turn them into open support tickets with the most skilled and relevant agents.
- Adopt a proactive outreach strategy instead of only responding to customers’ requests for help.
- Empower agents with a detailed views of their customer’s social history, such as previous conversations and used tags.
- Measure agent performance from the perspective of customer satisfaction.
- Utilize CRM technologies to enrich customer profiles and help out agents with single sign-on tools.
- Use analytics tools to gather and analyze customer data to better reveal customers’ experiences and sentiments.
According to Aberdeen, “Companies adapting to this new normal achieve superior year-over-year performance gains, compared to those that fail to adapt.”
Read the context of these findings and more in Aberdeen’s white paper, Social Customer Care: Secrets to Building a Winning Strategy. Download your copy free of charge!
