The future of Customer Service: More Mobile and More Social

Who get’s excited with a new desktop computer these days? Eh, nobody. How about a laptop? OK, maybe a few. Shiny new phones and tablets though get the juices going. Yup, the world has gone mobile. People are spending more and more time interfacing with devices they can hold in their hand or comfortably carry anywhere. OK fine, so how will that that change customer service? Well if your customers are the everyday consumer type (B2B is a different story) probably quite a lot. The reason being, this real-time mobile world brings with it a big slice of time spent on social media, up to 30% according to this Nielsen article.

Will this mean that rapid growth in social customer service will continue to grow? Oh yes it will, for a bunch of reasons:

It’s here, it’s now, it’s handy

Twitter, Facebook and the other multitude of social networks are the apps that consumers are likely to have persistently open. This is where they’re “hanging out”, so this is where they’ll be more likely to launch their service requests. Like it or not, our society has become distracted by our digital mobility and real time access to information. Things have become prioritized based on the distance they are from our noses. If we’re standing at a bus stop and thinking about how irate we are with our cable company, we don’t have to make a note to call them later. A quick tweet or Facebook post to let them know we’re not OK, done. At the airport and upset that as a premier customer you got bumped off a flight, or annoyed while waiting too long at your local bank, same deal. The new norm will be to vent and demand better service through social. Then on to the next distraction.

Can’t even find the darn phone number!

Searching on mobile is not so easy. Finding that phone number for your cable company, airline, or bank via your handheld, probably not going to happen. And anyway if it’s not critical do I really want to wait and navigate through a convoluted decision tree. Hash tags are easy though. Why not just use one of those? Less phone calls more social.

Chat? No so much

Ever tried synchronous online chat on your mobile device? Not so easy. Active chat conversations work best if you’ve got a full-on punchable QWERTY keyboard. And anyway you’re probably doing fifteen different things while mobile. How’s about a social post with details of the issue? Hey company, fix the problem, or post me back when you know what you want me to do next.

Make it 24/7, and make it snappy

Everything else happens quickly in this mobile world. Shouldn’t a response to my issue be the same? Studies show that a majority of social users expect a reply to their social post within an hour (that’s 60 minutes folks). So say good bye to those weekends off if you don’t want a backlog of missed posts when you come in Monday morning.

And what about forums, and self-service knowledge bases?

Forums the self-service solutions will always have legs. As more and more of these products are elegantly designed for mobile consumption they’re popularity will likely persist. But, like the company telephone number, searching, and navigating for the precise content needed is still often very challenging.

But wait, does that mean the other channels will go away?

Course not. Not at all in fact. Business-to-business customer service will see the fewest changes. Most business customer issues are submitted and resolved by folks sitting in their cubes while on the phone or online via “traditional” non mobile devices. Social for B2C will for sure grow at a rapid clip though as more companies realize that it’s in their interest to attend to it, and as consumers realize how easy it is to use they’ll use it more. And don’t let anyone fool you, problems, big problems, can be solved via 140 character exchanges. The limitations on the length of the post can be overcome but replying with links to knowledge articles or instructional videos and the like. But, obviously, once an issue passes a certain threshold of complication, or necessitates the exchange or private details, noisy social customers can be scooted back into those oh so calm and serene channels like phone, email and chat. Namaste :-)