Early in their existence, social media platforms were mocked relentlessly. Remember the days of, “What are people going to do, post about what they ate for lunch every day?” But in today’s economy, social media is a necessity. People find their friends, spouses, pets, and next bosses on social platforms. Naturally, where people go, businesses will follow. Many businesses owe their success to social media and require it to survive. Most companies today recognize the importance of having a social media presence, but it’s what you do with it that counts!
As peoples’ social lives are increasingly intertwined with social media, they expect to be able to deal with many facets of daily life via social platforms—including engaging with your business.
1) 80% of consumers use social to engage with brands
“I want to be where the people are,” is the beginning of a song from the Disney classic The Little Mermaid, and it’s great advice for your business. Social media is where the people are. Customers have been frustrated with waiting on phone lines, being put on hold, and the frequent automatization of phone lines. Sometimes email responses can take days, and younger people commonly check their emails less often than their social profiles.
Rogers Communications, Canada’s largest provider of wireless communication services, set out to improve customer satisfaction. They quickly realized they needed a page on Facebook to create a customer care experience that was most convenient for the customer. Rogers’ chief customer officer, Deepak Khandelwal, explained, “Over 17 million Canadians are on Facebook every day, so we wanted to go where our customers are.”
Several months after launching customer care on Facebook Messenger, Rogers saw a 65% increase in customer satisfaction, a 65% decrease in customer complaints, and 70% of their total customer support requests came in through Facebook Messenger. “It’s...helped us build a stronger relationship with our customers,” Khandelwal said.
2) Customers reach brands across an average of 7 social media channels
We’ve already established that as a business, you want to be where the people are. Now that we’ve arrived in 2020, most of your customers will have social accounts on multiple platforms. Each platform has its own norms and demographics, so you’ll likely have to learn several in order to create a convenient experience for all of your customers. Getting acquainted with your audience on every platform they’re on enables you to build comprehensive customer profiles by learning from their conversations across platforms.
Major online retailer Zappos responds to customers across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. On Twitter, representatives monitor the conversation in order to respond to positive messages, feedback, complaints, or shoppers looking for a product. This helps Zappos stand out from its main competitor, Amazon, which relies on webchat and call centers for customer care. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh stated, “The difference [is] in how we build a personal connection.” Zappos sought to create a positive social customer experience in hopes that it would lead to strong customer loyalty. And it worked! Zappos was so successful it created a branch called Zappos Insights to teach other companies how to operate with a digital customer experience-centric culture.
3) Customers that receive a response from brands on social media are willing to spend up to 20% more and are 30% more likely to recommend the brand
Engaging with customers on social media can both build relationships that increase brand loyalty with existing customers and help you find new customers. The same study also indicated that brands shouldn’t be discouraged by negative tweets and should instead see them as an opportunity: 69% of people who posted a negative tweet felt more positively about the brand when they responded to the complaint.
Domino’s pizza has been a pioneer of social customer care and convenience. Not only do they respond quickly to compliments and complaints on social platforms, but they also rolled out an #EasyOrder program to let customers place an order with just a tweet to them and a pizza emoji. Their customers don’t even need to close the Twitter app or page to make a purchase, making social a quick and easy channel for buyers.
4) 54% of customers prefer social messaging channels for care over phone or email
32% of US Internet users say phone lines are the most frustrating customer service channel. It’s easy to see why—difficulties with long hold times, reading out long order numbers or email addresses, and dropped calls can be inconvenient and time-consuming for customers. With social media, the customer can copy and paste important information and respond on their own time, without having to stop what they are doing and step away to a phone call.
5) It costs 6x more to solve a customer issue through a call center than on social
Social customer care is not only faster and less frustrating than call centers; it’s also more affordable. With social customer care, team members can assist multiple customers at once while waiting for responses. Social care management platforms allow team members to communicate with each other internally and ensure that each issue is sent to the appropriate team to solve. Payment issues can easily and seamlessly be transferred to billing departments, while product ideas and suggestions are also sent to development teams—all without the long hold times and awkward transfers common in call centers.
We know we said five, but we’ve got one final statistic to sum up our research in case you’re not convinced yet: Failure to respond via social channels can lead to a 15% increase in a business’ churn rate. This underscores the fact that social care shouldn’t be an afterthought; it must become an integral part of an organization’s care operation. The good news is that social customer care is a relatively new frontier. Companies of all industries have an exciting opportunity to be a leader in this uncharted territory, outshine competitors, and deliver superior customer experiences across all social platforms.
Looking to put your business a step ahead of the competition with excellent social customer care? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how Nuvi Engage can help you do it.
Perks of Nuvi Engage as a Social Customer Care Solution
- Set up custom queues to go to certain teams based on keywords, language, or more
- Once queues are made, DMs, comments, or @mentions are auto-categorized according the rules you set
- Flag high priority DMs, comments, or @mentions
- Team Members can claim and own incoming messages
- Built to flow with your team organization, not the other way around