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 @verygoodservice and, we’ll be asking the guys there a series of questions on the topic.
The latest one is below and you can catch up on the rest of the series here.
Has anyone proven the ROI of customer support through social media?
The question of return on investment for social media is very often raised and there are no universal metrics being used. Actually very few companies even attempt to assess it.
The critical factor here is to define objectives and to have metrics against the realisation of these. They could range from number of mention on a given media channel (basic) to an accurate measure of new sales against a very specific marketing campaign.
For all of them the easy part is the quantification of the “I” and the difficult part is measuring the “R”.
Interestingly I believe that ROI for customer service on social media is actually one of the easiest to measure, not so much in the very early stage when one individual does it a couple of hours a day, but definitely once a team is set up and handling a significant numbers of queries.
The reason is that it is easy to measure the input (man hours) and the output (number of queries resolved, potentially weighted by a complexity factor). It is also easy to compare the metrics with the alternative channels such as phone, email or post.
As a way of example, one of the largest US telecom company has one generic customer care Twitter account and 13 individual customer service agents operating under the company name, with a first name personalisation. I believe that measuring ROI becomes very possible at that stage and only by being satisfied that it works would such a large investment in people be justified.
We must however flag that doing customer service through social media is more risky than through the normal channels. If companies do it properly, they enjoy some positive marketing, if they do not do it well, everyone gets to see it and the damage to the brand would dwarf any potential benefit.
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