Social Media and Contact Centres
The Perfect Storm – Customer Service and Social Media
New research from customer service technology company Jacada conducted by YouGov reveals a growing challenge for consumer brands.
Quite simply, expectations and experiences of customer contact centres, either by phone or on-line are awful and consumers’ dissatisfaction increasingly fierce. In a separate report into whose opinions we trust on-line, the thoughts of strangers are now considered more trustworthy than editorial content.
Jacada/YouGov’s research is clear: 63% of respondents give up when accessing customer support online and 48% on the phone, without having their problem resolved.
A mere 20% feel satisfied by phone helplines. This figure fell to 15% for online support.
Over a third of us expect to get poor service when they call a helpline.
Meanwhile, in Nielsen’s annual consumer survey 90% of internet users trust the opinion of friends (no surprise there) but 70% trust the opinion of strangers posted online, slightly ahead of editorial content as a source of trust. For those of us who have long believed that earned media is the most valuable there is, this is a significant shift.
Where’s the storm though? How are these trends connected?
Simple: 91% of consumers will recommend a company with good customer contact according to CFI Group’s Contact Centre Satisfaction Index and the group with the higher index for customer dissatisfaction are also the most highly engaged with social media, 25-44 year olds.
The direct cost to businesses of this poor performance is just as worrying: roughly a third of phone and online queries are not resolved at first attempt, requiring a second approach by the consumer. Aside from the 33% waste of capacity in the contact centre, the impact on word of mouth is incalculable.
The question of how to measure the impact of social media is moving ever closer to the centre of strategy decisions – the customer contact centre is an obvious place to look for an answer.
[...] you’re ‘just a customer’ it’s off to 0870 limbo for you, to be told “your call is important to us” and a longer exposure to M People or Phil Collins [...]
In response to a growing demand more and more call centres have started integrating social media into their day to day offerings. This trend has been especially prevalent in the US, where call centre agents are being trained to deal specifically with customer queries via social media.
The good news is that more communication channels does not necessarily mean more staff. It is rather a shift in responsibilities that is required, with staff being trained if need be in both traditional communication tools, such as telephone and email as well as social media.
By allowing customers to interact with a site like Twitter they can post their feedback, without having to speak to four different operators only to find out that the first operator should have dealt with the query. By training a broad based pool of call centre staff on social media, when a query does comes through, the most relevant person can respond immediately.
Thanks for your reply. I wonder how much of the training is on the platform/software and how much of it is developing a new approach to social media? Customer service is so often driven by cost reduction – get the caller off the line as quick as possible, avoid escalation, deal with the query in one call etc. where as social media is driven by expectations of genuine empathy and understanding.