Social Customer Service: Trading The Phone For Tweets [Infographic]

There are some things our kids will never have any experience with like cassette tapes, floppy disks and what it feels like to dial a rotary telephone (even I barely remember that). At the rate customer service is evolving, another thing they may never experience is what it feels like to call a customer service support telephone number and stay on hold for what feels like forever to get a live person on the phone. We’ve all heard about companies who are handling customer service issues almost exclusively in social media, but do you know how popular it really is? Social customer service has definitely become part of the standard customer service lingo, and it seems to work well compared to the old way of doing it.

My first experience with social customer service was with the hosting company @mediatemple. The way they do it works quite brilliantly, or at least it appears that way from the outside. They have a list of their “tweetologists” (Twitter customer service reps) on the background of their Twitter page. Each person’s name has two initials next to it. Whenever they respond to tweets, whoever wrote the tweet puts his or her initials at the end.

That way, the customer always knows who exactly they are dealing with, and it puts a more personalized spin on the whole experience. It’s social customer service at its best in my opinion. They only have about 35,000 followers though. I haven’t had any social customer service experience with a company that has hundreds of thousands of followers. I’d be curious to know how they make it all work smoothly.

In this Customer Service In Social Media infographic by ClickSoftware (design by NowSourcing), we are treated to some staggering stats about the state of social customer service. It’s just another smart way social media can be used as a tool to build your brand’s online reputation.

Click Social Customer Service Infographic To Enlarge

Header Image Credit: [Our Social Times]