Customer Care: Socially Suspect

As Frontier has shown, the decision can’t be based on the age demographic alone. It’s cultural. Frontier has also shown that it’s convinced of social media’s ability to market to and build relationships in local markets at a very personal level, despite feeling it’s premature to emphasize the medium for customer care. So, at minimum, companies should invest in social media at that fundamental level — which is quite cheap — and slowly ramp up for the migration to other aspects of the business — which is inevitable.

Telstra, on the other hand, has shown that despite a few clumsy missteps, the numbers are making the case for social media in the care channel. Twice as many companies are handling 25 percent or more of issues through online social channels, while complaints for Telstra are down 26 percent this year and call volumes are down 21 percent. The company isn’t worried about losing communication with customers because of this decline, as the number of hits on its website reached 200,000 in September.

The customer satisfaction index is 42 points higher for customers who use alternative forms of care. That alone could tip the balance in favor of social media, especially since social media has told CSPs — as if they didn’t already know — that customer satisfaction is where their biggest problems lie. Besides, investing in social media now and applying it to the ways you interact with and thereby get to know customers will be essential for making sense out of the next step, which is applying big-data analytics to take social and customer care to a whole new level. It has to be done in steps, and big-data analytics isn’t going to wait for companies to catch up on their use of unstructured social data.