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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