This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Customer Service is the New Heart of Marketing . This webinar was sponsored by Lithium and featured Dave Evans (@evansdave), the VP of Social Strategy at Lithium, Erna Alfred Liousas (@ErnaLiousas), an analyst serving B2C Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research, and Brien Hall (@BrienHall), Social Media Manager for Guest Services at AMC Theatres. We discussed why social media is becoming the primary channel for customer care.

Here are three of the key takeaways:

1. Become customer obsessed! – Forrester research predicts we are in the Age of the Customer and that in order to become customer obsessed you need to master 4 business imperatives: embracing the shift to mobile, turning big data into big insights, transforming your customer experience, and accelerating your digital transformation.
2. A majority of tweets to a brand go unanswered! – Its simple shocking since its proven that customer are more likely to buy when you respond that still companies don’t get it.
3. Social media to become the primary channel in 5 years for customer care  – We spent some time discussing the impacts on the call center, first call resolution and do we need to create separate channels just for customer care in social media.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below. Our next webinar is titled Is the Death of Social Greatly Exaggerated?; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.