- More customer interaction channels are arising every day, especially around social, that are strongly favored by customers. This requires organizations to revisit their customer service strategy.
- Organizations are exploiting new interaction channels for sales and marketing, but generally lag in merging these channels into their customer service strategy.
- Customer service organizations are unsure when and how to integrate social media into their customer service strategy.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Customers are rapidly adopting a preference for social channels for engaging suppliers, as well interacting among themselves. As a result, service strategies based on older interaction channels are losing effectiveness.
- Most organizations have not fully integrated social channels with their customer service infrastructure, which prevents development of the most effective hybrid channel service strategy.
- Proactive monitoring of the social cloud for service opportunities is more effective at achieving service goals than simply adding social channels for customer-initiated inquiries.
Impact and Result
- Understand how customer service fits into the broader organizational picture to assess social media for customer service and update customer service strategies.
- Assess the value of new and old customer service channels to design an effective hybrid channel customer service strategy.
- Adopt a proactive approach to assisting customers in order to improve customer service outcomes.