The Business Case for Social Customer Service | Our Social Times ...

As we?ve highlighted in our recent social customer service posts, while most brands have now grasped the value of social media marketing, very few are investing properly in genuine social customer service.?It?s timely, then, that with The Social Customer 2012?(London) just days away, immediate future?have published a free white paper highlighting the costs and benefits of implementing social customer service.

Adam Lewis, Managing Consultant at the London social media agency, put it this way:??There?s often a fear that social will open up Pandora?s Box for customer service teams - an unquantifiable wave of hard-to-handle customer interactions?.

While there are lots of reasons why organisations haven?t adopted social customer services, scalability, or the feared lack of it, may well be the #1 reason why ? as?Frank Eliason?is quoted as saying in the Holmes Report today ? ?social customer service has been a complete failure?.

So is this fear well-founded?

At my?Monitoring Social Media Boot-camp in 2010 Giles Palmer, MD of the UK monitoring company, Brandwatch, explained how, out of 100,000 mentions that they monitored for a client over 6 months, they highlighted about 4,500 and the client ended up responding to less than 2,000. Anyone who understands social media listening will echo this finding. If you?ve got smart analysts, you don?t need to deal with noise.

I suspect, though, the fear is more about attracting, or even generating, thousands more social media queries simply by offering a social media customer service channel. Yet this smacks of brands putting their head in the sand. As immediate future point out ?In this multichannel world [customers] expect more support through channels that are convenient to them, not you?. And to hammer this message home, they add ?The fastest growing age group of social media users between now and 2015 will be 65-75 year olds?.

You can download a free copy of immediate future?s white paper here.

immediate future?s Managing Director, Katy Howell, will be speaking at The Social Customer 2012 in London this Thursday. Our impressive speaker line-up features Frank Eliason (Citibank), plus senior executives from Spotify, BT, British Gas, First Direct, Expedia, Everything Everywhere, Telefonica and ACCA. Follow the Tweet stream @ #scrm12.

Source: http://oursocialtimes.com/exclusive-white-paper-the-business-case-for-social-customer-service/

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