It pays to provide Support with Social Media

In a recent Forrester Report on “Customer Experience Pays Off as Social Media reduces Obstacles for Real Change” they have really nailed down the argument I have been making over the last year about why Support is the single best place to build your business case for Social Media.

If you look deeply at the Customer Experience as they did what they found was that 91% of executive would agree that the customer experience was critical or very important to their business. The issue of the customer experience always becomes how do we improve it and how are we going to pay for it – since the contact center is typically considered a cost center. But after you look at the research below it will be hard to call the contact center a cost center for long.

1)    Customers prefer a good customer experience over price – being the low cost provider in any industry is never a safe place to play. Someone can come in and undercut you (think Sam Walton against every major retailer). But in a recent survey by Forrester customers in every major industry preferred good customer service to price. Every Industry!

2)    Good customer experiences drive Word of Mouth (WOM) – we all know in social media that both good and bad customer experience stories spread like wildfires. Why not be on the winning side of that equation. But Forrester took it one step further and examined good customer experience and the likelihood to recommend a product and again a “strong correlation” in many industries between good customer experiences and WOM.

3)    Companies with good customer experiences have less customer defecting and are more profitable – this time Forrester detailed the revenue side of a good experience to find that good customer experiences equated to higher revenues and less defections – ALWAYS! An example of this was a bank and a retailer but I think this is true for any industry.

Improving the customer experience is never a bad idea and better yet it pays off! It pays off in any industry (B2C or B2B) and it pays off handsomely! So my point over the last year has been – why not use social media to deliver a truly exceptional customer experience? Specifically listening or monitoring for conversations about your brand and then inserting yourself when there is an issue. Our business case for social media was built around delivering outstanding customer service using social and what we have found was that by taking situations where we may have an issue and turning them around quickly into a positive customer experience we have created a strong base of “advocates” for our brand.

Forrester says that acquiring new customers is 5 to 20 times more expensive than retaining existing customers – this is where you can build your business case for social. By using social to retain existing customers with a delightful customer experience you can effectively save in the cost of acquiring new customers.

Some trends in business may come and go but delivering a great customer experience will never go out of vogue. Why not use Social Media to delight your customers.

Also if you are interested in checking out my new book Social Media and the Contact Center you can sign up for a free copy here. This is a special limited time offer for my readers as we wait for the book to be published at the end of April.

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