The weight social media has on brand affinity and customer satisfaction is constantly growing. Today 84% of consumers expect companies to respond within 24 hours after posting on social media, while 72% of Twitter complaints expect a response within an hour. But what does this mean for the future of customer service? Well, it’s been said that social customer care is actually the new business marketing. We are in an age where customer service has the potential to go viral, which means there is a lot more at stake for brands. Therefore, businesses must remain on the pulse of new innovations to ensure consistency and quality. Continue reading
Tag Archives: social-customer-service
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve been placed on hold at least once in your lifetime. In fact, 45% of customers can’t remember having a recent positive experience, and 35% of them say it was directly related to poor response times. This is a serious problem since timeliness is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. When organizations make customers wait for assistance, it can force them to seriously question why they still do business with you at all. Take a quick look at onholdwith.com for some shocking insight on hold time offenders.
Okay, okay, we’ve spelled out why hold times are so terrible, but unfortunately they are still a regular occurrence. Let’s see how we can try and make it a little more bearable.
Here are 6 things you can do to make it through those long, lonely, wait times: Continue reading
Every quarter we head on over to onholdwith.com and countdown which companies are being called out by the customer service Twitter police (aka consumers) for long hold times. You can view the results from last quarter here, and do some of your own comparing and contrasting from this quarter’s offenders.
In just a quick glance, it’s not too hard to tell which organizations have worked hard to improve hold times over the last few months, while others continue to fail time and time again. If we could place bets, we suspect some of these reoccurring offenders still haven’t nailed down the whole “call-back” thing yet. Continue reading
What a strange place Twitter is in. Consider the incredible influence it holds in the daily news cycle. Newscasts and white house press briefings talk about “tweets” with a seriousness that makes it easy to forget that no one outside the early-adopter circles had even heard that word before 2008. Or consider how iOS treats “tweeting” as a system-level communication option, on par with email and text messaging.
And yet, the company continues to struggle against sluggish subscriber growth and impatient investors. There were rumours throughout last year, that a sale was imminent. Part of the problem is that Twitter, as a product is successful in a few different “roles”. It works as a PR conduit for politicians and celebrities; as a global chat system; and as a customer service channel. That last role gets the least amount of public attention, but the company’s recent actions show that it sees a real future in this direction.
The contact center is becoming quite the paradox. It must be open-ended but also secure, both customer-centric and employee-centric, legacy-based yet modernized, and the list goes on. The reasons why are fairly simple: Consumer demands are continually evolving and so are the channels used to communicate those needs. The problem is that technology advances at a much faster pace than the contact center is able to adapt to, at least, for now.
The contact center industry is currently in a transition phase, where legacy systems will be refashioned by modern ones, and the once ‘low-level’ agent positions will be replaced by robust technology. It’s essential that your contact center is built for the future. And while the thought may seem daunting, there are a number of new ways to resolve the problems that will erode the success of call center operations around the world.
Here are the 10 biggest trends that can help call center professionals stay ahead of the curve. Continue reading
Which social channels do you turn to for customer support? Twitter? Facebook? Maybe even a direct message on Instagram? Over the years, social media has taken a minimalist approach to B2C support. But despite its architecture, social media remains a hot spot for customer service. In recent years, Twitter has undoubtedly become a key player; 80% of customer service requests on social media happen here, and the cost per resolution is 1/6th that of resolving through a call center. Additionally, Bain & Company found that when companies use social media to actively engage customers on service-related issues, those customers will spend 20% to 40% more on average with that company.
As other social platforms catch up to the customer service game, time is of the essence to perfect your social support strategy.
Here are 5 things to keep in mind when handling customer support on social media: Continue reading
Right now, the only news story you’ll see about Twitter is speculation who will acquire the $16B company. (Latest rumor: it’s Disney or Microsoft.) Twitter hasn’t seen the user growth investors expected and, as a public company, its fortunes are at the mercy of those expectations. (Even though those expectations aren’t always reasonable or relevant.)
Regardless, the company hasn’t stopped evolving its product. Lost in the buy-out chatter was an announcement that, I think, is quite significant: The introduction of specialized “customer service accounts”. This is the second time this year that Twitter has shown it recognizes its unique advantages in this area. It is willing to adapt to the needs of customers and companies who use it as a support channel and that could prove more valuable in the long-run, than all of its current schemes to goose ad revenue. Continue reading
According to Twitter, in the past two years the number of Tweets directed at leading brands’ customer service usernames has grown by 2.5x and that number is rising exponentially every year (50% to be exact). In the same report, Twitter found that 85% of customers who have a satisfactory social interaction are likely to recommend the brand to others. So, when a customer turns to social to contact you, it’s important to do your best to resolve issues as timely and accurately as possible. However, if your company is doing a great job responding to customers, but you’re still seeing a plethora of angry tweets directed at you, maybe the problem is how you’re handling callers. Social customer service should work in tandem with phone, chat, mobile, web etc. – you shouldn’t have to choose to be good at one thing or another. Continue reading
Few people would argue that technology is rapidly changing our culture, but it is the rate at which these changes are happening that may be surprising to some. In five years, it is estimated that our technology will be 32 times more advanced than it is today. Social media is one of the primary drivers of these advancements because it turns every business into a 24/7 global establishment.
Here are 4 things to keep in mind if you want to successfully perform in today’s environment.
![[Video] 3 Takeaways from Our Google Hangout: Call Center Trends](https://fonolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Video-3-Takeaways-from-Our-Google-Hangou.jpg "[Video] 3 Takeaways from Our Google Hangout: Call Center Trends")
Last week, Fonolo hosted yet another insightful Google Hangout, discussing the top 3 call center trends for 2016. This was our first ever hangout with just the Fonolo team. This fabulous panel shared their comments on where the contact center industry is heading this year. To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.
Let’s take a quick look at the Fonolo panelist: Mav Mehta, Account Executive, Daniela Puzzo, Director of Marketing, Nicolina Savelli, Communications Manager, and Shai Berger, CEO and Co-Founder.
