"Be where your customers are" is perhaps the first rule of customer experience.
And where are customers? On social media.
Indeed, the average Facebook user will scroll through the height of The Statue of Liberty in one day.
Yet, nowadays, it is not only Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to consider. Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have also become mainstream customer engagement channels.
By harnessing these platforms, organizations can build brand awareness, commercialize social media, and manage their reputation.
Moreover, a thought-provoking flyer from Content Guru suggests that companies can harness social media to:
- Complete omnichannel engagement strategies
- Provide rapid, real-time responses
- Enable personalised, proactive service
- Reduce inbound contacts through automation
However, many shy away from creating ambitious social customer experiences. Why? Because there are several daunting challenges to think through first.
The Challenges of Delivering CX on Social Media
Managing the pool of information about a brand, its products, and services is a hefty task.
It is not only conventional social media channels to consider. With blogs, forums, and third-party review sites, consumers have many avenues to spread the word about their experiences. That includes the brands they like and – perhaps more pressingly – the brands they don’t like.
Frankly, the crux of the immediate challenge faced by many organizations is just keeping up.
In addition, with the introduction of each new social media channel, the landscape changes – often dramatically.
As such, controlling the conversation around an issue or event is a considerable challenge. Multiply that, in today’s world, by a lot of events.
Finally, many organizations must ready themselves to meet soaring consumer expectations – especially regarding speed of answer.
Consider the following statistics: on Facebook, 85 percent of consumers expect a reply in six hours or less. On Twitter, 64 percent want an answer in one hour. Yet, according to Frost & Sullivan, the average business takes over a day to reply, indicating the magnitude of the challenge.
Indeed, there are multiple twists in the tail for businesses attempting to deliver excellent social customer experiences.
Luckily, with a forward-thinking approach, everything becomes much less daunting.
How to Deliver Excellent Social CX
To combat the challenges above, brands often formalize processes that structure how their contact centre organizes, distributes, and analyses the information it collects across its engagement channels.