Customer Service in Social Media – Best Practices and The Future of Self Service

Detecon International and the Munich Business School published an empirical research on the trends and challenges of customer-service management.

The mobile and web 2.0 revolution has changed the customers behavior. He actively seeks for information and has become a critical decider. Companies have to react to this new phenomena and actively participate in the discussion and influencing process of future buyers. The study by Detecon International and the Munich Business School takes a closer look at current best practices and predicts how companies will be forced to interact with their customers to be able to compete with other companies. The study (German language) can be downloaded here [pdf].

The study was composed on an empirical evaluation of 78 experts from customer service, CRM, marketing and management. The study comes to the conclusion that self service in social media is becoming an important topic. The autonomous customer is demanding service possibilities he can use at any time, any where and with little effort. 85% of the participants expect an increase of self-service, which will conclusively be one of the most important sectors to build in the near future.

Social media seems to be unstoppable and conclusively the participants expect that answering customer complaints via blog, Facebook or Twitter will soon be a standard procedure. Companies will just not be able not to serve customers via this channel.

New payment channels via mobile phones is also an upcoming topic, but what seems more important is that companies should listen to their customers. The digital feedback is easily stored and used for product creation and enhancement. Social media guidelines need to be established to handle criticism and nurture new ideas.

The study could only confirm what social media experts know since several years now. Having academic proof is always a good argument and shows the paradigm-shift in top level management.

Further, the study shows some great “best practices” and give some great ideas on how customer service 2.0 needs to be handled, as the following example from Telekom_hilft on Twitter shows:

As David A. Aaker already mentioned in 2000: “It is clear we have entered a digital age, and the strong brands of this era will be those that best utilize the Web as building tool”