Mistakes Companies are Making with Social Media for Customer Service

Generally, most companies are facing two realities in regards to social media: they cannot escape dialogue about how important it is, and yet they have seen only glimpses of the supposed benefits.

But before faulting social media, perhaps these companies need to look themselves in the mirror. A new study reveals the extent to which major retailers are squandering the opportunity provided by the newest form of customer contact.

According to Auros, which investigated how the top 25 UK online retailers are handling social media, most organizations are using social media, but few are using it properly. While adoption rates for Twitter and Facebook are 80% and 72%, respectively, a significantly-smaller portion are effectively building customer relationships.

On Twitter, not a single one of the studied retailers followed the testers back, even after active attempts on the part of the "customer" to develop a relationship and shift the communication to DM. As the study notes, following every customer is impractical, but doing things to create the sense that the audience is valued by the brand is common sense.

Even beyond the following issue, companies remained fairly uninterested in engaging with their customers on Twitter. Only 25% responded to a question directed to them; 20% responded to a negative comment and only 10% responded to a positive comment.

That response rate is very troubling. Though social media can be used simply as a brand awareness tool, its true value is in its ability to allow for meaningful, public interactions between companies and their customers. Yet even when they are receiving Tweets directly from customers (signaled by the @username), they generally do not respond.

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Though all the response rates are terrible, the fact that they prioritize negative comments over positive comments is also interesting (note that in addition to the higher probability of responding to a negative comment, they also responded to complaints faster—96 minutes on average for negative comments and 36 hours on average for positive comments). Obviously, damage control is both a necessary and attractive function of social media, but connecting with fans of the brand also has tremendous value.

Social media provides an unparalleled word-of-mouth opportunity; companies that want to capitalize on that opportunity should be doing everything possible to mobilize their loyal customers. Making them feel special with Tweets, re-Tweets and follows is one of the easiest, most obvious methods of getting that done.

And for as low as the response rates were for direct Tweets, they were even worse for indirect (no @) mentions—only two companies responded to those kinds of inquiries. If retailers are not on social media to actively identify, monitor, understand and engage those who are speaking—positive, negatively or neutrally—about the company, why are they on it?

Response rates for Facebook were also worse—17% for positive comments and 11% for negative comments.

On both major social networks, the brands also failed to deliver on the "instantaneous" promise of the media. Whether on Facebook or Twitter, the responses took no less than 78 minutes, with some (negative comments on a company’s own Facebook post, responses to positive Tweets) taking as long as 7 hours and a day-and-a-half, respectively.

Preferable to email, that is nonetheless hardly an encouraging sign about being able to engage the company in a timely fashion.

Because social media is now etched into society, customers no longer see the mere existence of a brand’s Facebook or Twitter account as compelling. They’re not impressed or amused by the fact that their favorite retailer Tweets.

Instead, they are looking for a platform to meaningfully engage with companies. No, they do not yet view social media as a full-fledged customer service channel in the vein of the call center, but they do want to discuss their positive and negative experiences with the brand, and they do want to see their questions, concerns, complaints and praises get publicly acknowledged.

By not properly responding (or even noticing) the social media correspondence, the company is quite clearly saying, "We don’t care about satisfying our customers." That, obviously, might not be true—the lack of response could be due to strategy (though it would be a bad strategy), internal skepticism (fear of backlash, liability issues over responses) or lack of resources (not enough manpower to respond to all requests around the clock).

But part of getting involved in social is accepting the burden of new customer expectations. Once companies make the "contract" to engage with customers on social media, they have no choice but to prepare themselves to hold up their end of the bargain.

Burden, of course, is an unfair way to describe social media—given all the valuable benefits in customer insights, brand reputation management, customer loyalty and customer advocacy companies can get from their social media interactions, "opportunity" is the better term.

Are you seizing that opportunity?