This week, we’re running a series of articles and features looking at customer service and the role social media has to play for small businesses. We are running this in conjunction with @verygoodserviceand, each day, we’ll be asking the guys there a question on the topic.
The latest one is below and you can catch up on the rest of the series here.
Social media: Is it customer service or marketing?
We would argue that companies need to decide positively for themselves where they want to go and which channels to use for what purpose.
Small businesses have much more room for manoeuvre as they can chop and change, test and experiment without affecting large volumes of customers. Very frequently, small companies run a single account, handling social interactions, marketing efforts, customer service and many other activities in one place.
They use mishaps as a marketing opportunity and dispatch little gifts and samples to “compensate” customers. Customer service is being used as a marketing tool.
Larger operators try to leverage their social media fans and followers by pushing multitudes of product launches, special offers and deals, in an approach which is little different to an email campaign. Positioning customer service through this heavy marketing traffic becomes more problematic; hence the need to establish boring customer service channels.
Quite a few companies are now actively trying to clean up the traffic on their main social media accounts by responding very quickly to queries of a customer service nature and pushing them out to a more traditional web based channel: nobody gets to hear about Ms Jones signal problem when she visits her son in Scotland and social media can then focus on marketing.
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