Keith Pearce - The changing face(book) of customer service

Cracking the 'social customer service conundrum' requires a coordinated for establishing, maintaining and optimising the new relationships. A plan of action that best addresses this new relationship. Here, Keith Pearce, senior marketing director EMEA, Genesys-EMG, Alcatel-Lucent, outlines how to implement a strategic social media plan and how, if it's done well, it can have immediate paybacks through cost savings, customer retention and revenue. 

A recent global study by the Economist Information Unit (EIU) and Genesys found that 81 per cent of executives were torn between investing more heavily in traditional customer service (aimed largely at baby-boomers) and accelerating investment in technologies designed to appeal to a new generation of younger customers (the Millennials – Generation Y individuals born between 1982 and 2001). Today, Millennials are already outnumbering baby-boomers, which means that more organisations will need a social customer service strategy this year. And that's probably sooner than they would have expected.

Every new plan needs a justified spend

As businesses start to recover from the economic downturn, they are scrutinising every penny spent. This can be a stumbling block for these new social media strategies, as one of the biggest challenges is accurately gauging its immediate business impact. Companies can assess the value of new channels and social media collaboration based on three key measures:

1. Customer satisfaction and retention – Last year's Genesys Cost of Poor Customer Service report, found that 80-90 per cent of satisfied customers would easily leave if the circumstances were right. Even though they were satisfied, this highlighted the fact that the right offer at the right time can take them away from you. The only way you can combat this is by truly engaging with your customers to convert them into 'prosumers' – individuals who have a more pro-active role in making, shaping (and sometimes breaking) purchasing patterns and who are now driving the process and influencing their peers.

2. Cost reduction and optimisation – Personal Paraguay, part of Telecom Italy and a Genesys customer, found that by adding an SMS channel more than 2.7 million calls were transformed into text messages – a customer choice that reduced the cost of customer service by more than 75 per cent. Another customer in Egypt, Etisalat, the Middle Eastern telco giant, was able to keep the costs of its 3G video customer service offering in check while scaling their staffing to more than 500 customer service agents. It grew from zero to more than 7 million subscribers in just over 20 months, and the video channel allowed Etisalat to reduce the cost of service per contact by two-thirds.

3. Real revenue gains – Etisalat’s new video system led to an 11 per cent increase in overall customer satisfaction, and a 70 per cent decrease in complaints in its first year of operation. Recent Forrester research reported that the annual revenue gains from only a 10 per cent difference in customer experience could reach $300 million per company per year. So you do the math!

Once you have put the business case together, you need to establish the areas you should be most mindful of when investigating new channels for customer service. And for this you need a roadmap.

Dynamically engaging the social customer

Many companies seem to have embraced new media – adopting a more measured approach towards text messaging, Facebook and Twitter as an initial port of call. But this is just a first step. The real need is for companies to leverage new communications channels and social media for bottom line benefits. This requires them to:

• Assess the opportunities and the ROI based on all relevant factors – cost reductions, satisfaction, growth, etc. Walk through the entire sales and service process for different segments of customers, to identify opportunities and gaps

• Realise that you can't do it all at once. Establish a media policy that identifies and prioritises the most useful channels. Look for feasible improvements that give customers a better overall experience

• Identify the appropriate technologies and solutions. Provision the right infrastructure and environment to support top communication priorities and deliver appropriate content that best leverages those channels

In short, the best advice is to take one channel at a time and build them into a stable, scalable infrastructure. Whether that channel be Twitter, a discussion forum, or an online user group, put enough resources and effort behind it to make it work. Put in the time. Engage with your customers but make sure that you don't intrude on interactions where you don't belong – you cannot be a 'peer' in a peer-to-peer interaction. Show people that you are serious and that you plan to stick around for the long term. If you respect your customers – and the community – they will likely both respect you back.

And that’s a pretty good start.

About the author

A fifteen year veteran of the high tech industry, Keith Pearce has worked extensively in new and emerging technology markets for customer service technologies – drawing on experience as a television news reporter and US Senate staffer. At Siemens, he helped orchestrate the migration strategy from legacy to new telephony products, starting in sales and later in marketing. At Nuance, he helped build the market for speech recognition software. As senior director of EMEA marketing at Genesys, Keith leads all marketing activities for the company in the region.

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