Social Customer Service: Gathering & Using Social Customer Data

One of the differences between Marketing and Service social platforms is whether they collect and can access interaction histories. Having that context for just social engagement is better than nothing. Having it as an integrated view across all channels is of course much better. Best of all is when full insight into a customer (their overall value) becomes part of social customer service capability. This remains leading edge CRM practice.

Without this context a whole string of failure points emerge:

1. Organisations are unable to spot escalating issues or key customers
2. Social advisors remain unaware of any promises made by other teams
3. Customers become irritated having to re-brief on their situation
4. The duration and effort associated with resolving a particular customer journey cannot be measured and therefore improvements are less likely to occur
5. Insights cannot be generated about cross channel behaviours at either individual and segment level

Of course, this is why many organisations have adopted CRM workflows. Unfortunately in the case of social customer service, social identities do not readily match with existing CRM records. How a customer names themselves in a peer to peer community, forum or Twitter often makes it a real challenge. At present 3rd party data matching services remain thin on the ground. So capturing and integrating social profiles remains a manual and incremental approach.

However there are ways forward.

Enterprising organisations able to communicate and deliver clear benefits to their customers around use of their personal data stand a much better chance of persuading them to providing their social IDs. Elements of that trust agenda could be:

• Allow customers access to personal data already collected about them so they can co-manage the information exchange
• Create an automated workflow that triggers invitations to provide social profile data at significant relationship milestones such as on boarding and renewals when customers are most open to change

However this is achieved, the development of social data has the same importance to effective service strategies as any other form of relevant customer data.

Other competencies in the framework for social customer service excellence can be accessed in ‘Related Content’.