It is not uncommon for in-house customer support organizations to mistakenly believe it is not their responsibility to support non-legacy channels, such as social media and mobile apps and will defer to the marketing or other departments to provide this support. This gap becomes even a bigger issue when companies consider outsourcing only their core customer support channels, such as telephone support, email and Web chat. The failure to extend and integrate customer support for social media and mobile apps results in fragmented customer experiences and inconsistent responses.
When considering outsourcing customer support, it becomes critical for companies to evaluate potential customer support outsourcers on their ability to provide fully integrated support across all channels. Although customer support outsourcers handle millions of transactions daily, the reality is that only a handful of outsourcers effectively support social and mobile apps today. Constellation Research’s new report, “Innovative Customer Support Outsourcers Expand Channel Support”, provides insight into how leading outsourcers manage social and mobile channels and suggests best practices for engaging their services.
Best practices related to social and mobile app support include the following:
- Engage with customers within the same site when possible. Customers have powerful communication tools at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook and can immediately spread opinions, comments and reviews to a vast audience over the social network. Companies need to reach out to social channels to stay in touch and monitor customer comments and views.
- Support collaborative conversations. One-way delivery of information does not foster customer engagement. Customer support organizations need to listen to their customers and use their feedback to improve performance. This includes monitoring social comments for customer opinions and issues, analyzing data to gather insight into customers’ behaviors and concerns and to respond to customer posts within the applications as needed.
- Link directly to mobile app. Provide customer support directly to the mobile app without requiring the user to toggle out to make a phone call or send a text message. This engages the customers more fully and promotes increased usage of the mobile app.
- Respond with speed and accuracy. Delayed response does not sit well with the socially engaged customer who shuns slow responses, such as email or with long delays for callbacks on problems. If a social response is too slow it may also trigger a separate incident over another channel resulting in a company handling the same request twice.
- Certify representatives trained for social support. Smart outsourcers realize that a representative’s attitude and skill has a profound effect on customers. These customer support outsourcers train and certify representatives proficient in handling non-voice interactions such as SMS, text, Twitter and chat and who can quickly respond to customers over social media.
- Gather insight from multiple sources. A telephone survey is not enough to collect business intelligence on customers’ actions, views and sentiment. Look for outsourcers who provide analytics across multiple channels delivers this insight and allows companies to make changes quickly when the situation requires immediate action.
Related Research
Innovative Customer Service Outsourcers Expand Channel Support
