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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