Delivering Effective Social Customer Service: How to Redefine the Way You Manage Customer Experience and Your Corporate Reputation

Chapter 1

Where Were You When It All Changed?

If you are just waking up to Social Customer Service you might well wonder how all this happened. Since the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube exploded into our lives, organizations initially thought they spotted an opportunity to extend their Sales and promotional activity into new channels.

However, their mindset proved out of synch with the times. For sure they could continue brand messaging as before and even extend their broadcast model to include limited customer response in the forms of “likes” and “follows”. In fact this has become the standard way in which organizations have so far defined their customer engagement strategies.

But organizations also discovered that the communication agenda is no longer exclusively set by the brand team. As publically shared platforms, social networks allow anyone to voice their ideas. So began the birth of Social Customer Service.

Customers began to post tweets when they were unhappy or had a question about the product or service. Some strongly worded Facebook groups were established against brands and organizations that were giving bad Customer Service. YouTube videos went viral (see our interview with Dave Carroll of United Breaks Guitars fame). But they all had one thing in common. Customers had tried to get their problems resolved through traditional Customer Service channels, but then struggled to get a satisfactory resolution. Social channels provided an outlet. ...