#GoodbyeOnHold

WHINING WITHIN 140 CHARACTERS is no mean feat. But with companies using social media platforms for customer care—more business necessity than cutting-edge concept—be assured of quick fixes for anything from rescheduled deliveries to stolen strollers aboard flights. “Social media has become the mainstream customer hotline,” says Bhupendra Khanal, CEO of Simplify360, a Bangalore-based social media analytics company.

Take @VodafoneIN (Vodafone India’s Twitter handle), for instance, where customer care comprises 60% of the total activity every month. The average ‘first response’ time on Twitter is 10 minutes, and the average end-to-end time for complete resolution is approximately five and a half hours. “Response and resolution times on our Twitter handle or Facebook page are much lower than conventional channels [like hotlines and e-mails],” admits Vivek Mathur, Vodafone India’s chief commercial officer. Vodafone has a team of more than 20 dedicated to grievance management via social media. Other companies like e-retailer Myntra prefer outsourcing to specialist agencies.

Social customer care has moved beyond customers escalating unsatisfactory service experiences. Brands today have become adept at capturing conversations on social media platforms quickly and turning them into positive service stories through rapid resolution—in effect, engaging the consumer, not just at the sales level (think social selling or marketing), but through the entire product life cycle.

“Nowadays people use Facebook or Twitter as their first port of call. Speed aside, they expect a high degree of personalisation in responses and that the brand will have their history at hand before they reply,” adds Mathur.

The ‘one to many’ and ‘many to one’ conversations also help, as opposed to ‘one to one’ through conventional mediums. And public resolution isn’t just promoting transparency on the part of a company, it generates a positive ruboff.

Even as one in three social media users globally prefers social care to contacting a company by phone (‘State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012’ by market consultancy Nielsen), the percentage in India is low, though on the up. Simplify360 predicts a rise from the current 10% to 15%, to around 50% by the end of 2014.

According to Boston, Massachusetts-based research firm Aberdeen Group, companies delivering customer support through social media achieve superior customer retention—7.5% vs. 2.9%.

Indian companies are on the same page. ICICI Bank tracks around 300,000 posts a year and responds to almost 30,000 customer queries on social media. “All grievances are integrated with the customer relationship management module built especially for Twitter and Facebook. We have created a separate form to capture queries from social media platforms,” says executive director N.S. Kannan.

The idea is to keep interactions conversational and personal, rather than scripted and standard. Also, social customer care agents are more informed, and handle queries better than their counterparts manning conventional channels, says Khanal.

Social media comes with serious reputational risks, but with India’s growing Facebook and Twitter populations, estimated at 96 million and 30 million, respectively, companies can ill afford to ignore it. ‘Handle with care’ just
got redefined.