Social Media Requires a New Approach to Customer Service

By Michael Osterman
in

As communication evolves, it becomes more viral and more rapid in its distribution. For example, a letter is essentially a one-to-one communication. An email is, at best, a one-to-several communication. Social media, on the other hand, is potentially a one-to-millions communication. The implication of such an enormous increase in the speed and breadth with which communications can occur is that the response to such communications when things go wrong becomes much more important:  ignore a complaint delivered via a letter and little will happen—ignore a complaint delivered via Twitter and lots of bad things could happen.

Take the case of Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays Dwight Shrute on The Office. On Tuesday, Wilson tweeted, “@DelTaco I will accept $12,000 to plug their [expletive deleted] food.” Four minutes later he tweeted, “Please disregard last tweet—was a private text to my assistant”. Five minutes after that he tweeted, “Loving the new @DelTaco Macho Bellgrande Burrito! It’s Beeftacular(tm)!” Whether or not this was a planned exchange or a mistake by Wilson who thought he was sending a direct message to his assistant, it illustrates the viral nature of social media communication.

There is an interesting new company whose focus is on helping organizations to manage customer service using social media as a platform. Conversocial, based in London, offers a cloud-based platform to help organizations manage comments, complaints and interactions with customers and commenters using Twitter and Facebook. The tools included in Conversocial’s offering include workflow management so that individuals can be assigned various tasks, tracking tools to enable management of customer and commenter interaction, prioritization of content (complaints get handled before general comments, for example), analytics to gain insight into how a company is engaging with the Facebook and Twitter communities, publishing tools that include the ability to schedule updates across multiple pages, and other capabilities.

The primary goal of Conversocial is to enable rapid response to comments and complaints on Twitter and Facebook, while at the same time reducing the amount of time required to manage these interactions. The company offers various packages designed for single social media managers through large teams of individuals who are charged with responding to social media communications. Their solution is quite interesting and is definitely worth a closer look.

Published October 27, 2011