Nearly Three Quarters of Companies Risking Their Existence by Ignoring Social Media

Do you have a good grasp on your customer relationships? Are you sure? While you may have been confident that you did five years ago, since then a tornado called social media has raised its head, and if you've got that in the bag along with all your other customer channels, congratulations. You're one of the few.

Even large companies are struggling to get a grip on social media – sites like Facebook, Twitter (News - Alert), Tumblr and many others where customers share information both good and bad on products and services. Your products and services, probably. So do you really know what's going on in that channel?

As a first step, it's important to know where management of social media belongs: in the same place every other customer management issue belongs...the contact center. To succeed, customer support personnel must have easy, well managed access to every interaction with an individual customer, whether it comes from e-mail, telephone, SMS, Twitter or Facebook if you expect to be able to respond appropriately.

This was one of the themes discussed at the recent Genesys (News - Alert) Social Media and Customer Services Summit in London, where guest speaker Dr. Natalie Petouhoff underscored the importance of social media in the contact center using a personal experience: a situation involving a guarantee on a pre-booked and pre-paid seat from an airline.

While the airline wavered on guaranteeing the seat, Dr. Petouhoff tweeted the issue to her more than 12,000 followers. The airline was quick to pick up on the tweet and resolve her issue – likely at the public relations level, since it recognized the potential for a PR nightmare in the making – but the airport desk staff were unaware of the actions of the company made at higher levels.

“It is so important that brands monitor what is being said about them on social networks because these conversations are permanently online,” said Petouhoff. “Social media comments being said about our companies are like cave paintings, lasting hundreds or thousands of years. I predict in 10 years that the brand which does not understand social media will no longer be in business. Customers gravitate to companies who listen.”

It's a serious problem: 72 percent of attendees at the Genesys conference said they had not yet integrated social media into their wider customer support organization, said the company in a press release.

One wonders what they're waiting for. Bankruptcy court? 

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