When four social care experimenters sent 280 Tweets over 26 days to 14 leading brands across several industries, their intent was to test each brand’s social customer service speed, efficiency, and quality. Each Tweet evaluated the brands in five categories:
- Urgent (I need help now)
- Positive (thank you)
- Negative (service complaint)
- Question (question from the FAQ page)
- Technical (complex need requiring more than one interaction to solve)
What they found might surprise you:
- Apple, Wal-Mart, Visa, and Starbucks: No response
- Pepsi was the fastest responder at just 19 seconds (wow!)
- Bank of America had the highest response rate, meaning they had the highest number of replies relative to the total number of Tweets sent
According to the infographic, some of the nation’s top brands and recognized leaders in Net Promoter ScoreTM appear to be social customer service laggards.
While some may dismiss social service as a new channel and assume that complainers will have an ounce of forgiveness when they don’t receive a response to their Facebook post, others see social service as a ripe opportunity for customer experience differentiation. This may describe the situation today, but tomorrow will surely be different. Soon, social customer service will be another customer expectation that every company will have to meet.
So the question arises, what is the best way to integrate social service into the traditional customer service environment? Customer experience management partners offer integrated solutions that make it easy for companies to monitor online social activity, use alerts to identify brand promoters and detractors in real time, and then effectively react to mobilize promoters and recover detractors. The best social customer care providers will offer:
- Services that easily transition across all communication channels, moving customer concerns from social media to other channels and even self-service portals
- Automated systems that put brand detractors into an integrated marketing touch plan and encourage brand promoters to participate in other social media outlets
- Social customer service provided by certified Net Promoter® professionals and customer experience experts
Research for this infographic was provided by Software Advice, and this article summarizes some of the research and infographic content. Net Promoter Score is a registered trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.
