By
Tara Jones, Allant Group
Picture this: a customer orders a product from your business and
expects it be delivered within a few days. When the delivery doesn’t arrive,
she panics. She reached for her phone to place the order, to track the order,
and now she’s reaching for it again to inquire to your brand about the delay.
She has a few choices. She can call your company. But what’s the number? She’d
have to look it up. She can email your company, but to what address? She’d have
to look that up, too. Or, she can simply open her favorite social media app,
search for your company name, and send her question directly to you within
minutes…or less.
This is the exact type of customer that retail brands encounter
each day. Their customers prefer to receive service on social media, and fast.
In order to handle the volume and demand, the retailer must use a systematic
balance of artificial intelligence (AI) and authentic, human-delivered customer
care.
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On the timeline of marketing and marketing automation, social
media is one of the newest business tools for retailers to utilize. And while
brands were developing their web sites for marketing purposes, social media
became a vehicle for digital customer service overnight. In addition, recent feature updates such as messenger and the deployment of bots present both opportunities and threats,
not only to a customer’s experience but also to a brand’s reputation.
But back to our customer. As the company, you have a
short window to make her concern a positive experience. While your response
time is essential (since the average social media user expects to be assisted
within an hour), your empathy and ability to troubleshoot the delay is equally
important. This is where social media AI, or the use of bots, can either help
or hurt your customer’s experience and your brand’s reputation. By using a bot
to immediately acknowledge her message, you are maintaining lightning fast
response time and ensuring your customers that they’ve been heard. But can your
bot research the cause of the delay? No. That’s why a strategy that
implements both bots and human interactions is the best practice for social care.
When developing your bot + agent social care strategies,
consider these three points:
1. Bots are beneficial, but they’ll never
replace human empathy.
It’s clear in the definition of a bot: a computer program that generates responses based on some input,
usually keywords. While this is a solution that can address general
inquires 24/7 with immediate responses, every computer-generated system has
risks, such as being prone to hackers and being limited to human programming.
Most notable, an excessive use of bots runs the risk of dehumanizing your
brand.
2. Humans relate best to other humans, but we
can’t work ‘round the clock’.
Effective customer support with
empathy and emotional intelligence can never be replaced by bots. But depending
on your brand and industry, it is probable that your social customer service
volume outnumbers your care agent resources. In addition, the operation costs
of a large, agent-only care team can quickly add up. The tools, training, and
HR costs can become overwhelming.
3. A balance of both is best.
Carefully balancing the use of both bots and customer care agents
is often the best strategy for managing social media customer care. This system
would allow your company to immediately respond to your customer’s inquiry
about her product delay, triage it to an agent who can troubleshoot the delay,
and respond again with solutions and empathy — making for the best care
experience and a positive brand reputation.
According to the Forrester Research report, The Three
Customer Service Megatrends In 2019, “Great customer service is not just
about cutting costs or making operations more efficient. Instead, it’s a
systematic reinvention of established technology, data, and operations —
leveraging automation, data and agents together to exploit each of their unique
strengths and deliver experiences in line with customer expectations.”
Develop a social media customer care center by deploying the
proper software, employing adequate staffing and creating workflows to deliver
both AI and authentic human interactions with your customers.
Tara Jones
is an award-winning marketing and communications professional, blogger, social
media lecturer and speaker. With more than a decade in communications and
social media, her work is focused on helping businesses cultivate meaningful
connections with their communities through strategic social media efforts that
make people a priority. Jones is a business consultant for Allant
Group, which
provides marketing technology services that help businesses effectively acquire
new customers, retain and grow existing customers and win back lapsed
customers. She can be reached at [email protected].
