Don’t make Facebook customer service a silo
Pretty much all customer facing companies have woken up to the power of social media and the new channels it provides for customer service. Lots of organisations are monitoring conversations on the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but a high proportion are not integrating it with their overall customer service strategy.
In many cases the customer service side of managing Facebook pages or responding to complaints on Twitter is handled, not by trained contact centre agents, but by senior management or marketers. This not only wastes the valuable time of these staff, but creates an expensive silo around social media that adds to complexity and is not scalable. You wouldn’t expect your senior marketing or managing director to be answering customer service calls in your contact centre – the same rules apply to social media.
So how can companies sort through the huge volume of social media conversations and communicate effectively, without increasing their costs? Extending access to your existing online service systems and knowledge base content from Facebook is a good start point. Integrate your web self-service solution into your Facebook page and you will deflect potential complaints before they are voiced, as well as getting valuable understanding of the needs of your Facebook followers. It is a simple first step that helps avoids the creation of new customer service silos. From that you can build a wider strategy that extends multichannel customer service across social media – without increasing your overall budgets.
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