Embracing social media in customer communications

Guest blog post by Mark King, Senior VP, Europe and Africa, Aspect

In its 2011 report Social Banking: The Social Networking Imperative for Retail Banks, Accenture claims that while 90 per cent of financial institutions will dedicate funds for social media initiatives by 2012, the majority are still novices in the field. Forty two per cent of online adults are keen to engage with their financial providers using social media, according to a 2010 Forrester Research study.  However, Accenture suggests that few firms yet know how to generate significant business value from engaging with customers, partners and employees via this channel.

Aspect offers the following best practice tips for organisations looking to embrace social media in customer communications:

1. Engage with employees first: Before reaching out to customers, trial social media with your own staff. Find people that embrace the social scene and create ambassadors that can reach out internally and externally. Also engage social media-aware executives to influence more senior managers.

2. Align social initiatives with business goals: Such as how to grow revenue, or retain profitable customers. Campaigns that engage large numbers of people can sometimes end up creating lots of contacts but little value.

3. Monitor and analyse: Don’t just monitor social networks for positive and negative mentions of your organisation. Also identify and monitor networks where customers, competitors and commentators gather. Find out what they’re discussing, what technologies they’re using and feed this into your social planning.

4. Set business rules that determine how and when you engage with customers: This, together with the subsequent workflows that ensure issues are resolved rapidly and effectively, can unlock significant business value. Integrate social media communications into your overall customer contact strategy as a distinct channel and compare social media performance in the context of your total engagement strategy.

5. Set up direct customer contact options:  Where appropriate, provide customer contact options on your company Facebook and Linked In pages – including self-service pages and helpful Q&As – enabling customers to contact you directly. When Bank of America adopted Twitter for customer service, users said it was easier and faster than traditional channels. 

6. Use customer segmentation techniques: To target specific customer groupings. Accenture reported that Chase created an online community of mass-affluent consumers, working with them to design the highly successful Chase Priority Club Rewards card. 

7. Choose your technology wisely: Identify and implement what’s right for your business – and make use of existing customer contact investments such as workforce optimisation capabilities, workflow rules and call centre performance analytics to maximise efficiency and performance.

8. Bring experts into customer conversations: Using Presence technology, service agents can see the location of specialists and know whether they’re in meetings or available to talk. Customer interactions that start with customers hitting click-to-call buttons and speaking to agents can now progress to screen sharing with at-home experts.