I got a lot of feedback from my last blog post, and I’d like to share my thoughts on each of these statements about customer service. I am sure my point of view is contentious, so please keep comments coming. It will force me to rethink my stance. I’ll cover each of my categories in a separate blog post.

Social Customer Service Myths

 

Myth

My POV

Reason behind my POV

Social CRM is giving customers control

 

Nonsense

Paul Greenberg defines social CRM as the The "company's programmatic response to the customer's control of the conversation." Its about the company taking hold of the reins of the conversation, not the other way round.

Have a look at what Paul Greenberg says here about this topic:  

Twitter works for customer service

Half-Truth

It sometimes does if the answer can be communicated in 140 characters. It shows that you, as a company are listening and acting on comments.

However, instead of engaging in customer service over Twitter, it is often more effective to take the conversation offline to a more suitable communication channel based on the issue at hand and the customer’s channel preference.

Twitter does work for proactively communicating with your followers. For example, Vmware pushed out proactive knowledge to their 6000+ followers over tweets, helping deflect calls into their call center.

I don’t need to interface my social processes with traditional customer service processes

Nonsense

Your social channels, and social processes are just an extension of the traditional channels that you already support. Every interaction, done over social and traditional channels should be viewed as an opportunity to strengthen your brand by providing the same knowledge, data and service experience to your customers. This is especially important if you are in a space of selling undifferentiated products and services.

If I have a forum, I don’t need a knowledgebase

Nonsense

A forum is a great place for customer-generated information; for example best practices, how-to information, success stories etc. It is not the place for company-sanctioned information like policy and procedure information which belongs in a knowledgebase.

Best practice is to have not one or the other but both a forum and a knowledgebase which are deeply integrated.

If I have a social listening platform, I don’t need to do surveys

Nonsense

You need both, not one or the other. Nobody can say this better than Esteban Kolsky, a former Gartner analyst and  SCRM expert. Check his blog out on this topic here: