Talk to anyone in the software industry and in less than 5 minutes you will hear the phrase ‘social media’. Whether it’s accelerating revenue cycles, improving employee relationships or providing customer service, social media is the new elixir. Companies are manning Twitter tags and gearing up their Facebook sites in the quest to have better relationships with their buyers.
Post-purchase buyer engagement is the charter for customer service. It’s a tough job though when B2B Sales closes the deal handing the customer off to the support organization often with very little information other than what they have purchased. The result of this ‘over the wall’ toss is a disruption in the buyer’s experience from what they had during the evaluation and purchase stages of their journey.
Trust is broken. The buyer feels betrayed. Yet B2B companies baffled by the seemingly unwarranted dissatisfaction immediately question what’s wrong with the product or customer service. They should, instead, look at the overall experience the buyer is having. The artificial internal boundaries of Service, Support, Marketing, Sales, Finance, etc. are unnecessary barriers to buyer satisfaction.
Harold Goldberg, chief marketing officer of Merced Systems, a sales and service performance management solutions vendor, sums it up well, “customer service is all about aligning to customer behavior.”
A core principle of the Buyers Journey is that everyone is a buyer, all the time. The Buyers Journey is a set of organizing principles for aligning company functions and roles to enable, engage and establish enduring relationships with buyers. “Customer” is an artificial label for counting and segregating buyers that have purchased your product. The notion of “customer lock-in” is, in today’s world, a myth. Customers don’t stop evaluating their purchases or their vendors just because they bought. It’s actually the opposite; buyers are always buying even when they’ve just bought.
Companies are realizing buyers are more likely to talk about their buying experience and ask product questions on social media. Likewise, they’ll turn to social media first to complain or share a bad experience. Companies that are able to “hear” those comments first and thoughtfully respond, quickly, with facts and actions win loyalty and credibility. That’s gold. Companies also gain real cost savings in the form of deflected customer calls. According to IBM ‘s Institute for Business Value, Best Buy realized $5Million in annual savings from social customer service. Even more gold can be found when Social Media is used to redefine customer service.
But before you set out to evaluate the over a hundred social CRM and customer service vendors, the place to start is to understand how social aligns to your buyers’ service expectations. The traditional vendors have stretched the definition of social customer service to include chat, co-browsing, SMS, and even video. The “social” customer service vendors only support a few (like three) social media channels and relatively low volumes of interaction. Fully automated social customer service solutions that seamlessly integrate with CRM, contact center, ERP and other enterprise systems and can support high volumes of social interactions across a broad set of diverse social channels are hard to find. I don’t think they exist yet. Today, high volume customer service organizations cobble together multiple point solutions with a lot of elbow grease. For example, a premier digital media search company uses over ten point solutions only to find they still can’t get their arms around it all and respond fast enough.
Aligning to buyer expectations on service can only come from “across the board visibility into metrics up and down the organization”, said Goldberg. His mantra is a simple one, “transparency comes from empowerment which comes from information.” How do you get transparency? Empower front line employees with better information and insights based on analytics and qualitative information such as resolving the customers issue on the first call” Most of the customer experience in Service comes from dealing with an agent or sales associate. They have to get it right in every encounter. Analytics and big data are the core enablers of empowerment. The other enablers are company leadership and culture change. “Many companies do not really know what it means to live in a socially-driven world. Their CEOs need to recognize how customers want to be talked to,” shares Goldberg.
Whether it is looking at buyer engagement chronologically to gain a holistic view as to why they are contacting customer service or understanding customer behavior and determining what the best next steps are, only through big data analytics can buyer interactions be analyzed and deciphered. With over 140 big brand customers that have large, high volume contact centers that handle hundreds, if not millions, of interactions a year, Merced Systems’ turn analytics into empowerment by identifying ways that an individual agent or entire center can drive better performance. For social customer service, Merced’s analytics and metrics enable companies to understand the context of the customer conversation.
To leverage social customer service, Goldberg’s advice is that companies need to view buyer engagement holistically. He recommends having a dedicated group of agents to handle social media. Let them experiment and learn because the rules of what constitutes world-class social customer service haven’t been written. Figure out the type of customer comments and requests, what type of infrastructure is needed to empower those agents, and how to most effectively move public interactions into private channels.
To mine the gold of social customer service, deliver a consistent experience across Buyer Enablement and Engagement Stages by tearing down internal boundaries. While a company’s goal maybe to cut costs or reduce churn, social customer service will only be successful if the interactions and motivations are understood from the buyers’ perspective.
Source: Forbes
