There can’t be anyone reading this who hasn’t heard about social media being used as a new channel for customer service.\u00a0 Facebook, Twitter, Youtube – all of these channels are being used by consumers to engage (or broadcast to) companies.<\/p>\n
\u00a0So what’s in it for customers and companies when they use social media?<\/p>\n
\u00a0Companies:\u00a0 Consumer’s habits are changing, there are a whole generation of people for whom using the phone is the last option, so to reach out to and engage with this generation, then companies must use new channels.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Consumers: The power of influence – where as interactions with a company used to be a 1-2-1 relationship, now, any interaction is very public.\u00a0 It’s not just a company’s call recording system that is listening now, all of a consumers followers on Twitter, or friends on Facebook get to see comments about a company.\u00a0 These extra ears or eyes help increase the influence of the consumer’s message<\/p>\n
\u00a0So should we stop all investment in ‘traditional’ customer service channels and focus all our efforts on social media?\u00a0 No, would be the short answer.\u00a0 If I look at examples of the power of social media<\/p>\n
Lord Sugar tweeting about BT<\/a> There is a common thread uniting all of these.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t start on social media – they started on a traditional customer service channel, the contact centre.\u00a0 Only when these people didn’t get the service they expected did they escalate to a channel with a very wide influence.\u00a0 So the lesson for companies is clear – every interaction, on any channel now has the power to influence your brand, positively or negatively.\u00a0 Keep investing in your traditional channels, trust your people to say the right thing, and empower them to solve customer issues.\u00a0 That way, when consumers comment about your company on social media, you have a much greater chance of it being a positive experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There can’t be anyone reading this who hasn’t heard about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[509],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nYoup van’t Hek’s campaign on Klantenserivce<\/a>
\nDavid Carroll’s YouTube video<\/a><\/p>\n