Corporate Social Media Engagement: Be Careful What You Wish For

A continuation of my earlier post about corporate social media engagement.

While there can be lots of positives when corporates actively use social media tools. There are certainly plenty of potholes on the road to watch out for too.

Assume you've started using Twitter and Facebook to engage your customers directly. The number of followers / fans is rising and things are looking up. Suddenly it hits you: an increasing number of customers are starting to use these channels as an alternative to the standard customer service touch-points (CS hotlines, emails, service centres).

Now what?

The ideal situation would be to have dedicated customer service staff monitoring the social media channels constantly (even 24/7, given the nature of social media). This way, a corporate's own customer service team is cued into the issues or concerns that are most relevant to its customer pool, thus allowing for a more proactive approach to managing the issues customers face with a corporate's product/service.

Yet this is likely to be the biggest bugbear corporates face, given the necessity of a bureaucratic (in the Max Weber sense, not the derogatory sense) organisational structure among corporates. Certainly, the inherently chaotic nature of social media makes it highly challenging to monitor and measure the social-media-as-customer-service approach.

Highly-challenging, but not impossible.

If social media is conceived of as a large chat room with many people within talking at once, the answer is clear. Corporates need to invest sufficient resources in customer service to ensure that these voices in the chat room can be listened to and handled with respect and care as expeditiously as possible. Just because social media is chaotic doesn't mean that the usual customer service check lists can't be applied. On the contrary, the offline customer service tools and experiences can be adapted and deployed to social media.

Which brings us to just 1 thing: convincing the boss to sign off on this....