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Taking the Next Step

The first step in addressing social customers is to decide who internally will be interacting with them. Someone in customer support? The CEO? A dedicated community manager or a social media practitioner who spends his or her days sourcing brand-related conversations and participating when appropriate? In any of these scenarios, it's important that companies be ready to scale and grow. Why? Because once there's even an ounce of interaction between a company and the social customer, customers will expect the company to stay engaged all the time.

  • Companies need to think about ways to train social customers so they don't use Twitter just as a bullhorn every time something goes wrong.

Companies need to think about ways to train social customers so they don't use Twitter just as a bullhorn every time something goes wrong. Setting up a support community similar to what Research In Motion has done is a great model to follow. RIM uses its @BlackBerryHelp Twitter profile for customer support, offering up tips and tricks and also linking to relevant BlackBerry.com blog posts and forum discussion threads.

One of the worst things any company can do is create a thriving community and then abandon it. Unfortunately, this happens all too often. Before launching new communities, Facebook fan pages, and Twitter profiles, a company must get a firm commitment from everyone involved to continuously engage in these channels. Otherwise, the company will surely be at the center of criticism and will probably be featured in a Harvard Business Review case study titled "What Not to Do in Social Media."

The next step is to get the customer support department involved, if it isn't already. In some cases, a company might need to justify human capital and overhead expenditures for any external engagements. Of course, the advantages of customer support engaging with the social customer goes far beyond where the audience is: Considerable cost-saving side effects can be had by augmenting service and support operations to include increasingly more social touchpoints and efficiency. According to research data from the help desk industry, the cost to answer a support call is between $13 and $40. Imagine a call center that receives an average of 1,000 calls in a 24-hour time period. On the lower end of $13 per call, that's $13,000 a day ($4.7 million annually), and this doesn't even take into consideration the cost-per-minute charges and other overhead costs to manage a call center.

Finally, it's important to note that crowdsourcing has grown since 2004 with the publication of Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. In his book, Surowiecki argued that large groups exhibit more intelligence than smaller groups and that the collective intelligence of a community can shape business more effectively. That said, it's important for companies to create a community for their customers to interact in and make product-related recommendations. With services such as Get Satisfaction, companies can instantly create crowdsourcing and support related communities that are integrated with corporate websites almost instantly.

Social customers are here to stay and are gaining influence every day. They're not shy about providing public feedback about the companies and brands they use, either. This can be either a serious threat to a company or an opportunity to create customer advocacy. Companies need to keep the social customer top-of-mind when optimizing internal business processes and creating external engagement strategies.

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