How does a business figure out whether social media is for them? And if it is for them, how does the company determine the best way to deploy social media?
According to Tim Passios, director of solutions marketing for Interactive Intelligence, provider of call center software, the answer is to do your homework first.
“We have found there is a lot of hype around social media and our customers are confused; do they need to follow it or not?” Passios told ContactCenterSolutions at the Interactions 2011 Conference, an event at which he hosted a lecture about social media. “I educated them on doing the basics – do your homework. Find out: is your customer of the particular target profile that uses social media? Are they the right age group? Are they accessing the Internet? And, if you don’t know, ask them; find out.”
Passios said that despite the belief that everyone is on Facebook and Twitter, the majority of Internet users today are not on social media and when they do go on it’s simply because they are passionate about a particular brand or they are looking for price discounts. They are rarely, however, looking for customer service.
For those companies who identify that that their consumers are active social media users, however, Passios recommends becoming familiar with the hundreds of social media sties out there that deal with everything from healthcare to retail to pharmaceuticals.
Last year, Interactive Intelligence inked a partnership with Buzzient, a social monitoring company, to provide an integrated social media monitoring, routing and reporting solution. Passios said the partnership has afforded them lots of new possibilities to efficiently handle online social media content.
“If you don’t know where your customers are and what locations they are going to be, a social monitoring tool is an absolute necessity because they could be everywhere,” he said. “If you are a high profile consumer brand you need to be looking at a social monitoring tool. If you are not and can identity what sites theses people are on… then just focus on those; you don’t need a monitoring package to be able to do that.”
Companies have turned to social media for a variety of reasons, but Passios cautions against turning to those sites for an accurate portrayal of customer satisfaction. Passios touched on the fact that social media is now becoming a collection point for customer data, albeit highly negative data.
“There’s a reason why people are going to social media to give the negative comments and I think the primary reason is because they can’t get good customer service with the normal channels that they have today,” Passios said. “… The reason they are getting all the negative comments is because people are going to Twitter just to get attention from the company they are trying to get through to in the normal channels.”
To view the whole interview, click below.