Social Media Is Now a Viable Support Channel
Esteban Kolsky, founder and principal analyst at ThinkJar, also sees this as a major problem. Social media "is a bad [customer service] channel," he contends, "due to a lack of proper integration into multichannel solutions that would allow it to be automated, share knowledge, and use the same rules."
Twitter, for one, though, is working to change that. It has plans to aggressively increase its data licensing business, selling access to tweets to help companies better serve their customers.
Twitter has already partnered with Sprout Social and Oracle, giving these companies access to its extensive tweet archive going all the way back to 2006, when the platform first launched. Armed with that information, the hope is, companies will be able to identify the tweets that matter most and see which tweets and responses generate the most interaction.
Integrating social media into other CRM and call center processes and applications is a chore, but it has value, according to March. "You want to link social to your other contact center processes. You want to be able to match up your customers' social profiles with other channels, like email," he says.
"The integration doesn't need to be so hard to do," March adds. "Sharing information between platforms isn't that much of a challenge as long as you get the information to your IT teams."
March recommends asking customers to provide email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information at the onset of a social interaction to make matching the data less of a challenge later on.
DECIDING WHERE TO GO
Another sticking point for companies that haven't made the move to social media is deciding on which platforms to use and support. Companies can't go wrong by establishing a presence on Twitter, which certainly isn't the only social media outlet being used, but it is the most common.
At Hyatt, Moriarty says, the amount of customer service activity on its Twitter handle has more than doubled this year alone.
Hyatt's numbers mirror Twitter's data, which shows that the number of tweets targeted at brands' customer service handles has grown 2.5 times in the past two years, and 47 percent of all users have reached out to brands for customer care through the channel. The same research found that the number of U.S. adults using Twitter for customer service increased by 68 percent in 2014.
Twitter also recently released a 122-page playbook, called Twitter for Customer Service, that is loaded with tips for companies interested in using Twitter as a customer service channel.
That doesn't mean companies should discount Facebook and others. According to Ragsdale, 37 percent of social media users who have reached out to brands have done so through Facebook.
“Twitter and Facebook are the two main channels right now for social customer service, but more will certainly follow," says Mark Mortensen, a principal analyst at Analysis Mason.
Mortensen expects WeChat, which is already popular in Europe and Asia and is now extending its reach into the United States, to gain ground as well. LinkedIn, which is particularly popular among business-to-business consumers, is also emerging as a customer service outlet.
In general, "social media is a sizable channel that a lot of people are using," March says. "To say that it's not a valuable channel is shortsighted. It can be just as effective—if not more so—as any other text-based channel."
Because of that, March expects to see "a lot more innovation" around social media as a customer service tool.
As this happens, though, he encourages organizations to invest cautiously. "From a technology perspective, you need to invest in software specifically designed for social media," he says. "You can't use basic CRM tools and just plug in social media. You can only deliver excellent social customer service if you are using software specifically designed for that purpose.”
Senior News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.
Building Beyond 140 Characters
Though the San Francisco–based social media giant hasn't confirmed it, Twitter is reportedly planning to increase the maximum length of tweets beyond the 140-character limit, according to a recent article on tech news Web site Re/code. If and when this happens, the opportunities for customer service could be significant.
Not every customer contact over social media can be easily resolved in a single exchange or adequately expressed in a sentence or two, especially if the issue is very technical. Allowing for longer tweets would make it possible for customers to explain their situations in more detail and for contact center agents to provide more detailed answers, decreasing the number of posts that need to go back and forth.
"It will make it easier to send longer complaints without having to send multiple tweets," says Joshua March, CEO of Conversocial.
Twitter has already removed the 140-character limit for direct messages exchanged on the site, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume that the tweets themselves might be permitted to expand, analysts agree.
Dan Moriarty, director of social strategy at Hyatt Hotels, says increasing the character count for direct messages "has been great for us. It was a smart move for Twitter, and it enables us to better respond to our guests."
Moriarty's not so sure that removing the limit for regular tweets will have the same effect. "The average consumer is on Twitter because he likes the brevity of it," he says.
The move could even backfire for Twitter. "Usage of Twitter will go down dramatically with longer tweets," says Esteban Kolsky, founder and principal analyst at ThinkJar.
Kolsky says the changes might not be enough and that Twitter will continue to suffer as a result of caps that limit the number of posts daily to 1,000 and hourly to 100. "Can you imagine doing the same to the telephone?" he asks. —L.K.