There has been a lot of hype around social media and how it could become a premiere channel for servicing customer requests but we’re not quite there yet according to a recent report from Business Systems incorporating survey results from over 100 contact centre professionals.
When asked to predict their busiest channels for customer contact in 2015, social media came third accounting for just 17.4% of responses. Inbound email came in second at 18.3% and phone remains at the top with 58.7% of contact centres surveyed expecting customer contact by phone to lead the way again this year.
Taken as an average across all respondents, social media is expected to account for just 11.5% of overall contact from customers in 2015. This is relatively surprising particularly when there are stats out there to suggest that customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20% to 40% more money with those companies than other customers.
Bian Salins, Head of Social at Capgemini Consulting and a long-time practitioner of managing customer contact on Social channels comments “As consumers adopted social into their lifestyles using mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook, there seemed to be a justified increase in the number of contacts over social and a considered effort by brands to integrate social into the Omni-channel mix. Fast-forward five or six years and reality seems to have set in for both, brands and consumers.
Despite the appetite and interest, brands are still grappling with a clear understanding of how to make social scale as a channel within its contact centres and blend it with the right metrics, operational efficiency and skill sets whilst faced with the pressure of an always on, public dialogue.
This lack of understanding, buy in, employee empowerment and the resulting inefficiency to resolve the customer’s issue within the social channel itself has all contributed to deflating the initial view the customer had that they could get noticed, listened to and serviced quicker via social. So what we’ve seen is the number of contacts slowly plateau and a loss of interest to actually put in the investment and thought to make it work.”
This point is emphasised in the Customer Service in 2015 report produced by Business Systems which highlights that investment in social media technology is lower on the wish list than expected at 23%, coming in seventh out of a list of twenty potential technology investments. In the few instances where social media was expected to account for over 30% of customer contact in an organisation in 2015, this was predominantly within the banking and travel industries.
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