Notes from Social Customer Service Summit Nov. 22nd, 23rd 2013

The Solariat team just returned from a very successful Social Media for Customer Service Summit in New York last week:  http://events.usefulsocialmedia.com/customerservice/  Big thanks to the organizers, UsefulSocialMedia, for putting on a great event!

It was fascinating to see how much the market has grown in the past year - brands are clearly moving and fast.  There were lots of stories and stats all pointing to the fact that brands and consumers are really discovering each other in social, volumes and intensity are growing.

Our view is that social for brands is fast becoming a big data problem.  While we were confident we were right (anything data rapidly becomes big data in this modern world), we were pleasantly surprised by the fact that this is now widely recognized.  And as a result, this is a market in need of the next generation of technology.  Real technology, not just simple listening and publishing tools left over from the early days of manual marketing efforts.  Scale is the fire breathing dragon just around the corner.

Brands spoke about sheer volume (one astonshing stat about 5 tweets per second...), about the need to triage and sort, about the need to respond accurately and quickly...expectations are rising.  There's just no way that brands can scale with social CSR headcount.  While technology isn't the answer to everything, it's CLEAR that brands are going to have to take a serious look at technology in order to have some handle on the growth and complexity of this medium.

The other big theme we resonated with is that social has to be thought of as a channel just like voice, chat and email but with some important differences.  For starters it's public.  But more importantly, consumers feel a sense of entitlement in social that they don't with other channels.  It's where THEY are  and the brand has to play by rules they don't get to control.  One implication of this is that the demands coming in are broader than what usually gets encompassed by support.  Social is a strong alloy of marketing, care, support, service...

There were plenty of other interesting takeaways about the social channel - all of them pointing at the seriousness of the data challenge.

1.  Social tends to be bursty and fast.  Events hit social FAST and the volumes go up fast.

2.  It's an escalation channel.  For now, a lot of consumers are heading to social after they have trouble in some other channel.  This doesn't seem to be the case for some industries, like airlines.

There was much, much more.  We at Solariat would be delighted to talk to you about your particular experience.  There are exciting and challenging times ahead!

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Technology and Social Media Customer Service

By now we’ve all seen the statistics - social media customer service has arrived.  It’s clearly happening.  The only issue now for brands is how to make this work effectively and efficiently.  Social customer service is not the same as community management.  It’s really about accepting that social is one more channel and that it has to accept the same operational requirements and measurements of other service channels.

Social is of course, a very different kind of channel.  It’s public and it’s noisy.  That means that brands have very different kinds of challenges even if they have to achieve the same kind of performance standards.

Every channels goes through certain evolutionary phases. First, there is just the basic mechanism, like setting up the phone lines and email addresses.  Then there are the scaling problems as the volumes go up like how do you handle calls in the thousands versus the hundreds.  As the scaling problems get addressed, the new competitive frontier turns towards optimization.  The brand can handle volume but can it handle volume well.

We all know that the rate of technology evolution is faster and keeps getting faster.  Voice-based service systems evolved over many years, email emerged and grew faster...Social is growing much faster and so brands are going to be pressured to innovate.  Stop-gap and shallow technology solutions are going to become obsolete in very short time horizons.

At Solariat, we decided to take on the big challenges right away.  To accept that customer service in social is not just a BIG DATA problem but a bad and noisy big data problem.  The BIG issue with BIG DATA is making sense of the data.  It’s even harder with social because it’s so diverse, noisy and dynamic.  That’s why the old social listening tools are just not up to the task.  You can’t just listen with keywords.  

And even worse social demands speed in the response.  Brands have to sense, adapt and respond at the speed of social.  As consumers discover this channel, the range and volume of the inbound will grow and brands will have to be ready to respond intelligently.

Our conviction is that real technology is needed NOW. Technology that listens smartly.  Technology that actively assists the CSR in building responses.  And reporting that matches what service managers expect with other channels.

And all of this delivered in an integrated platform that fits hand to glove the workflow of real CSR’s.  That’s the challenge we have taken on at Solariat and SocialOptimizr is our solution.

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