[SCVS Webcast] Not your Grandpa's Customer Service

[PaulGi Lithium Alumni (Retired)]

Joe Cothrel, Lithium's Chief Community Officer will be talking about the evolution of social support. If you have questions for him for his live chat session, then please let us know!

[Ei-LunY Lithium Technologies]

Attendee Question: Is there a good book or web site describing how to set up and run a Facebook support community?

[Ei-LunY Lithium Technologies]

Attendee Question: While resources to handle customers are declining, isn't it also the case that customer expectations of how their concerns and service is handled is chaging as well?

[Ei-LunY Lithium Technologies]

Attendee Question: Can you comment more on support in the B2B space? Can these communities be as successful as the B2C ones?

[Mark_Hopkins VIP Council]

I think finding a good social engagement strategy that allows company resources to scale with a growing customer audience on social nets is important.   Sometimes a company will be focused on creating multiple / numerous social properties on facebook and twitter, and beleatedly realize they have just multiplied the number of places where customers can ask questions and seek support, and must now be monitored and supported.

In my experience, customer expectations are increasing.  Five years ago, customers were surprised when a company responded to a post the customer had made on their own blog and were generally accepting and thankful for interaction in the comments on a company blog.  In the last year, I'm seeing customer expectations for a response in less than 24 hours.  Perhaps even an hour or less on Facebook and twitter.   Perhaps as much as a couple hours in the forums.

More customers are on social networks, and the expectation toward rapid acknowledgement and use meaningful responses is accelerating.

I think tying these social networks into the rest of the company community - forums, blogs, ideas, community KB, makes sense - to allow many of these interactions to result in persistent and re-usable content rather than having it just flow down the page or stream of tweets to be lost.  Instead, allowing it to live on in the community helps build equity in social content.