Corporate Web StrategyWeb Marketing ideas, tactics, trends and more….

In Jeremiah Owyang’s post – Reinforcing Customer Service in Social Mediums, he asks for submissions of experiences where social media has proven to be more effective, efficient and helpful in customer service.

Today, I will attempt to explore some considerations when it comes to adopting social media as a viable channel to manage customer service in an organization.

There was a comment posted by Sean Odriscall on how he believes that implementing such a change would require extensive business process reengineering, planning as well as a redefinition in measurement metrics. It’s not merely as simple as creating and engaging with an online community.

I totally agree with Sean in this area, but I also believe that if such a change would give a company an apparent competitive advantage, it should definitely be explored. Perhaps a preliminary study on the extent of how social media is currently being used to engage customers in an organization, and the effectiveness of such relationships would help to provide a perspective towards a full and official adoption of social media in organizations.

Another aspect that needs some attention would probably be a company’s culture and acceptance towards this approach in managing customer relationships. While some companies embrace such moves with open arms, others may regard these changes with wariness, suspicion or even resistance. Not all existing customer service personnel would be adept in using social media on a professional level, and some of them may even require some form of training.

Enlarging their job scope by adding a “social media” responsibility, would mean that less time and focus on existing responsibilities. Resistance or reluctance to change would result in some staff attrition, or reassignment to alternate roles.

Nevertheless, if customer service staff can be made to realize the value that this new responsibility brings to their careers, they would be more open to change. They need to understand that as social media is becoming the norm, rather than the exception, experience in managing customers through this media would be more of a plus point than a disadvantage. With this, a proper communication and education strategy has to be put in place.

While metrics are put in place, bear in mind that there are certain aspects of customer service quality that needs to be considered. How do we measure the effectiveness of our responses to our customers online? What are the rules of our engagement with our customers?

With social media responses being more “permanent”, “accessible” and “distributable” as compared to phone call responses, corporations have to ensure that guidelines are ready to guide the tone, nature and approach utilized in written communications over the web. This would also encroach conventionally less formal channels such as Twitter, in which now supports live search engine results as well.

All in all, social media for customer service is definitely a viable form of engagement in the very near future. But I guess our experiences in deploying such exercises may require further refinement before the ideal implementation process and procedures can be defined.