February 13-17 is Social Media Week in cities around the world. We'll share some learnings from events held in Toronto throughout the week.
As a non-profit, we love to engage with donors and supporters using social media, but how is social media impacting customer service in business? And what can we take away from their experience?
Some well-established Canadian co
mpanies including Canadian Tire, TTC, Chapters-Indigo, BMO, Rogers and G Adventures answered some of those questions and shared their experience of delivering customer service and engaging with their customers through social media during a talk in Toronto as part of Social Media Week.
One interesting statistic stood out. While 62% of customers are looking for more support through social media, only about half of the top 50 brands are replying back via those channels. It was also interesting to find out that older customers have the highest level of expectation.
So how are those expectations being met? Some companies have trained their customer service staff to answer queries from Facebook and Twitter, just like they would a phone call. Other companies have opted to bring in their marketing team to monitor social media and respond to questions. In some cases, after-hours services are needed to manage the 24/7 reality of social media and others have made social media a priority from the leadership level all the way to individual staff members.
One thing everyone agrees on: the customers are choosing the channel through which they want to interact and companies must respond in that same space.
Look up #SMWTOcs on Twitter for more insight on this topic.