SOCIAL CUSTOMER CARE
Social Media & the Contact Center
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Current and prospective customers are increasingly using social networking to communicate about the products and services they buy or intend to buy. These peer-to-peer or customer-to-customer communications are sometimes happening instead of contacting the companies who offer the products and services. Various departments in enterprises see opportunities with social networking, including sales for lead-generation, public relations for brand promotion/defense, and product management for product feedback and ideas.
The following research presents a picture of the use of social networking for customer contact in North America in 2010. This research service also outlines the key trends, drivers, challenges and restraints observed in the social networking for customer contact market during 2010, along with the Frost & Sullivan strategic recommendations for growth initiatives.
Market Trends: Explosive Growth within the Use of Social Networking
During the past several years, there has been gradual—and since 2009, an explosive—growth in the use of social networking on the Internet. This is partly due to the advertising-funded model many of the most popular social networking sites operate on.
Some recent statistics about the leading social sites are:
Facebook
• 300 million active users
•
50% log on everyday
•
Fastest growing demographic is over 35 years of age
• Supports 69 languages
• 70% of users —outside the United States
• Buyers Journey
Twitter
• 50 million tweets/day
• 75 million users
• 20% contain product or brand references
LinkedIn
• 48 million over 200 countries; 1 joins each second
• 50% of members—outside the United States
•
Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are members
YouTube
• Serving 1 billion videos per day
•
Every minute, 20 hours of video uploaded
Market Challenges
•
Non-business Perception of Social Networking: a wide-spread
perception that social networking is a cultural phenomenon
engaged in
primarily by young people and has little or nothing
to do with business. It’s
also viewed as an employee
time-wasting activity and a potential security
risk for company
confidential information. (Source: recent Frost & Sullivan
survey of C-level executives)
•
Unclear business case for social conversations: Even as
business cases for supporting customer communities and
forums are good, the
business cases for the monitoring of
social conversations are not as
clear. Most social conversation
monitoring business cases seem to be
based on difficult-to
quantify intangibles. While some enterprise public
relations
groups engage in monitoring, it has not been sufficient for most
customer service organizations.
•
Enterprises’ lack of social strategies: It’s still early days for
social
networking’s business value; in many enterprises the
awareness of the
potential of social network is just emerging.
Departments within
companies view the opportunities
differently: sales sees lead-generation
opportunities, public
relations see brand promotion and defense, product
management sees crowd-sourcing product/service feedback and
ideas,
and customer service sees another channel for support.
Very few departments within enterprises have pulled together
these
views/opportunities to create complete social networking
strategies or
programs.
•
Economic conditions: The current down economy in which both
enterprises' capital budgets are tight and credit hard to get makes
investments in new technologies and applications particularly
challenging.
•
SMB Market segment challenges: Selling customer contact
solutions
to SMBs has its own challenges, including
products/services must contain
SMB-appropriate levels of
functionality, must be easy-to-use, low-cost to
support, priced
competitively, and sold/serviced by local-to-the-SMB
suppliers.
Most of the currently-available customer service-related social
networking solutions have been designed for large enterprises
and are
being sold and serviced directly by the vendors.
Market Drivers
•
Growing awareness of Social Networking’s power:
Increasingly,
the positive impacts of social media are in the
news, and its use grows as
more business people are
becoming personally aware of its possibilities for business
related communications. In addition, there is a growing library
of well-documented business success stories for the support of
customer communities and forums which document both hard
dollar cost
savings and many other less-tangible benefits.
• Customer retention: One important justification for investments
insocial networking programs is the desire to better support
customer retention initiatives. Providing excellent customer
support across customer
interaction channels, including social
networking, is one aspect of
enterprises’ customer retention
strategy.
• Competitive advantage: Enterprises, particularly those in the
most mature and globalized industries, are relying increasingly
on excellent
customer service for competitive advantage. These
competitive strategies are driving investments in social
networking for customer service programs and functionality.
• Customer experience: As with the customer retention and
competitive
advantage drivers, many enterprises are increasing
their focus on
tracking and providing excellent customer
experiences for their customers
and prospects. Support for
social networking and its seamless linkage
with other customer
interaction channels is a natural extension of a comprehensive
customer experience program.
• Proactive customer contact: Leading companies are
discovering the
strategic business value of comprehensive
approaches to proactive customer contact. Proactively addressing
customer questions and issues
which are expressed in social
networking settings is a natural extension of a comprehensive
proactive customer contact program.
End User Recommendations
For enterprises not already supporting social networking for customer service, some recommended beginning steps to take:
• Investigate your enterprise’s current social activity by conducting a
trial of
one of the listening/monitoring social conversations
services. The results
will provide input to your next decisions on
what to do and how urgently.
– How many of your customers/target prospects use social sites?
–
What are they saying about your products and services?
– How much of these conversations are customer service-related?
– Track competitors' social conversations—look at the same topics,
notice how actively your competitors are engaging in
social conversations.
– Analyze patterns (growth rates, types and frequency
of references…)
•
Ask your contact center vendors about their plans to support
social networking.
• Find out which other departments have or are planning social
support.
• Consider business cases for adding social networking support.
• Consider listening to social conversations as part of your overall
“voice of
the customer” initiatives.
Click to read the entire Market Insight report on Social Networking for Customer Contact.
For more information on optimizing your demand generation strategies with Frost & Sullivan, contact
Jessica.gordon@frost.com
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Telvista provides innovative contact center outsourcing solutions and
leading-edge social media services to companies that want more from
their customer relationships. We believe in delivering what matters most
to you. |
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Click here to view Telvista's Social Media
Center in its Dallas, Texas location. The Social
Media Center, which overlooks the 600-seat
contact center, will serve as a control room for
a team of analysts monitoring social media for
its clients. |
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Telvista’s seven PCI-certified locations throughout the U.S. and Mexico deliver optimized support solutions that impact top-line revenue and bottom-line cost. We serve a large client base and a diverse set of industries, including telecommunications, travel, financial services, retail, technology, and many others. Services include customer care, technical support, sales, loyalty programs, social media services and more.
We are proud to be a vital part of our clients' success by offering customized programs that enable you to do more with less while maximizing your bottom line. |
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