Hypatia Research Group published a research study report, entitled “Exploiting Social Intelligence for Customer Service and Support Excellence,” which features the results obtained using the Hypatia Galaxy Evaluation Methodology.
Leslie Ament, senior vice president and principal analyst at Hypatia Research Group, said, “Organizations that adopt social media tools for customer service, combined with best practices for rules-based business process workflows, are empowered to utilize their social channels as decision support and customer engagement for value creation.”
“Not surprisingly, 44.4 percent of customer service and support executives cited the ability to respond to customer requests for support, service or information promptly as the highest reason for investment in social engagement tools,” Ament added.
The evaluation included 27 software vendors, evaluated on a basis of 12 criteria. The report also showcases current trends, organizational challenges, best practices and return on investment metrics that are employed by top performing organizations.
The report features case studies and tabulated data to highlight the business potential.
For this report, analysts at Hypatia Research Group surveyed over 1100 global organizations. It was found, however, that only 246 respondents can use, recommend or have any say in the purchase of social media software for customer service and support initiatives in their organizations.
The analysis features and uses all data collected from the 246 respondents.
According to Ament, customer experience is an intangible metric while a customer engagement can produce a tangible outcome. Social technologies can be leveraged as one of many multichannel interaction methods with customers to create a differentiation for early adopters.
Other salient findings of the research study are the ways by which organizations set goals and objectives for investments in social customer service and support initiatives, the roles that are accountable for these programs, and how such teams should be structured organizationally.
Numerous methods are employed by organizations to synergize the online interactional information of customers from Web self-service, online chat and social feeds like Facebook and Twitter, with transactional data stored in CRM, marketing databases and ERP systems.
The report also covers return on investment benchmarks based on geography, industry, maturity level and size of organization. Best practices that can be used as benchmarks in the use of social channels for customer service and support – and how they can be used by other organizations – were also highlighted in the piece.