In this webinar, we talked with Mike Ellsworth of Social Media Performance Group about social media customer service and the social media aware contact center. Mike is the co-author of The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success, and a long-time buyer of I.T. services and products.
During our discussion, Mike gave examples of how to turn negative social media commentary into positive commentary and explained how social media can help transform your contact center from a cost center to a profit or opportunity center.
Let's let him explain: "Social customer service involves using social media to improve the customer experience. Whether it’s finding out more about the customer’s background and interests before responding to a query, or monitoring social sites in real time to discover customer needs before they become problems, social customer service is an attempt to treat the customer as a human being, rather than just a problem. Using social customer service, you can more easily create a relationship with the customer which in turn does two things: it defuses highly emotional customers – you’re less apt to yell at someone you know than at a stranger – and it can create greater customer satisfaction – even if the customer problem isn’t resolved. Finally, social customer service can be a gold mine of product and feature information. You can easily get information about what your product should do, directly from your customers."
From the rundown, here's the list of questions we covered with Mike.
- Mike, let’s get started - What is social customer service?
- Why should companies get involved in social media monitoring and response?
- In your book, you mention an example and a study by the corporate executive board. Can you tell me about that?
- You also talk about customers that know each other, and probably talk to each other. Tell me about that.
- What are B2B companies doing with social media?
- What issues should companies look at if they want to revamp their contact center to include social media?
- How should companies look at training and prep for their agents?
- Final thoughts.
The entire webinar is about 30 minutes in length.