• What You Need to Know About Social Media for Customer Service
• Michael Maoz |Jenny Sussin
• 12 September 2013
• Customer service and IT leaders must understand the impact of the five most popular use cases of social media for customer service to stay relevant and to excel. These include the employee roles, processes and technologies that support them.
Key Findings
• The most popular use cases of social media for customer service are focused on connecting customers to one another versus evaluating customer service operations.
• Social media applications for customer service are typically purchased and used independently of social media applications for marketing, e-commerce and sales.
• Social customer service success is dependent on people across customer service, e-commerce, marketing and sales working together and establishing processes for supporting a unified brand image on social media.


Recommendations
• Assign the necessary people to social media for customer service. Skimping on proper people resources will hinder your company's ability to provide real-time customer service and could have a negative impact on your company's brand.
• Team with social marketing leaders to train your customer service agents on how to develop and protect brand reputation through social customer service.
• Invest in social customer service technologies to help agents queue up social inquires, and to help customer service managers identify areas of success and those in need of improvement.

• By 2015, businesses that lack an all-channel customer engagement strategy will lose 15% to 20% of their best customers to competitors that have such a strategy.

In 2013, Gartner decided to retire the Magic Quadrant for Social CRM in an effort to more granularly define the social space and its complementary focus on the core CRM disciplines of customer service, e-commerce, marketing and sales. In this research, we will delve into five cases of social media for customer service, commonly cited by our clients in inquiries and at events, along with the organizational roles, processes and technologies that complement them.

Intelecom Content

Gartner has identified five of the most popular use cases of social media for customer service in the report featured in this newsletter. In this article we will drill deeper into using social media engagement for customer service. We will also take a look at the employee roles, processes and technology required to support this activity.

Why There is No Time to Lose
Customers enjoy the immediacy of using social media and want quick, concise and straightforward answers to their questions. "By 2015, businesses that lack an all-channel customer engagement strategy will lose 15% to 20% of their best customers to competitors that have such a strategy.1"

The Importance of Integration for Social Media
Gartner found "Social customer service success is dependent on people across customer service, e-commerce, marketing and sales working together and establishing processes for supporting a unified brand image on social media.1" The secret to departments working together is system and telephony integration.

Keep Queues Moving
At the heart of customer service is fast response and first time resolution. Implementing Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) technology allows skilled-based routing in queues regardless of which channel a customer is using. It can be telephone, email, Facebook, Twitter or numerous alternatives.

Keep Key Influences Close
Individuals with high numbers of followers, especially celebrities, are regarded as key influencers. CCaaS technology has been prioritising VIP callers for years and the same best practice can be applied across all social service channels.

Moving Towards the Customer Engagement Centre
Technology is an enabler to allow organisations to move towards a true customer engagement centre regardless of the communication channel customers chose to use. CCaaS can aggregate social media posts, assign posts and create filtered queues, prioritize key influencers and integrate with database, CRM and media archive solutions.

Multichannel Reporting and Workforce Optimisation are a Must
With added complexity as a result of multiple channels, management of the Contact Centre become equally more complex. Only a complete CCaaS solution such as Intelecom Connect provides the same standard of reporting across all channels.