Do companies really understand their customers?
If they did, surveying customers wouldn’t be such a big business. There is often a serious gap between the quality of customer service companies think they are providing and the quality of service customers say they are providing. InContact recently posted an article on how social media can help close the customer expectations gap. A summary of that article is below:
The methods of fixing a customer support system are varied and detailed, but before a company engages in any fixing, they need to know precisely what the problems are. This is where social media monitoring can be an excellent resource and tool. More than half of customers under 35 today use social media to complain about companies and services, according to JD Power. The information is readily available; you simply need to be in a position to find these posts. From there, you can respond to them and turn the situations from complaints into opportunities.
Social media is a way for companies to say to customers, “We’re here. We hear you. We want to help, and we want to change.” In the past, some studies have found that customers who complain but have their issue resolved to their satisfaction make even more loyal customers than those who never had a complaint in the first place.
Social media monitoring, therefore, is a critical component of today’s multichannel contact center. It can’t be an isolated operation, stuck in marketing and disconnected from the customer experience. It can’t be a sales function that will distract sales personnel from doing their real job. It needs to be a contact center operation that can be tied into the overall cradle-to-grave customer relationship, handled like any other customer contact and resolved using the full arsenal of the contact center’s resources: CRM, customer history, billing and shipping information and more.
For many companies, social media has represented a significant challenge to success. For smart companies, it should represent what it really is: a powerful opportunity when used and handled properly.
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