Social media is still a buzz word to many even though it has been around for a while. Did you know that blogging is part of the social media circle and it has been around far longer than you ever heard the phrase “social media”?
With the current trend regarding this somewhat new medium and companies hopping on board to get part of the action, many brands are busy creating social media teams with the hopes of tapping into the web 2.0 playing field. If you are looking to build a social media team, view this post I published a few days ago on building a kick ass social media team.
With this said, not everyone realizes what it takes to have a proper social media team and strategy in place. This can sometimes cause your company more harm than good in the long run. In many cases social media can reduce customer service, and this can be a huge downfall for your company. Why is this?
Social media customer service
- Having dedicated social media channels raises the expectations of your customers because they believe they will be serviced immediately. Most companies cannot live to these expectations.
- The service levels for traditional customer service (email, telephone, website contact forms) increases because of the real-time speed nature of social media. Many can’t deliver at this speed.
- With social media, there is way too much focus on marketing and not a lot is focused only on customer service. Broadcasting and boasting how good you are will really not help you that much if you are not able to deliver on the needs of your customers.
- Dedicated social media teams are not always connected to the business itself and have found that customer service on the social web a big hassle. If you have a social media team, collaborate with everyone in your organization so that they can do their job – service customers. There are many social media collaboration tools that can help with this and should be a center part of your social media campaign.
