Customer engagement is the frequent interaction of a customer with a company on consent of physical, emotional and psychological grounds. Social media has triggered a trend which has completely shifted the “company-customer” interaction to “customer-customer” interaction. Consumer behavior has changed in recent years as people now rely more on other consumers than the company itself, when it comes to advice, reviews etc. about a product or service.
Now, when software development companies are involving themselves in social media, it gives them a chance to learn about the consumer behavior through such interactions. Companies have discovered various benefits of engaging customer communities in social media. Such engagements help organizations to monitor and extract market intelligence through customer involvement and learn about their habits and preferences. Interactions between customers can be understood using various monitoring and listening tools available on social media platforms.
Social media could bring many advantages to a company in terms of branding, marketing and sales but improving internet technologies have taken social media to the next level of customer service. Deploying customer’s interaction on social media could advantage a company as:
- It is analyzed that customer or consumer could be served much better over conventional contact centers of an organization.
- Customer involvement drives more sales of services and products. A very famous saying mentions that a friend’s advice is the most beneficiary medium of advertisement as it entails a sense of trust with it. The personal network of customers gets involved with organization if that customer is satisfied with the company, which ultimately profits the organization.
- Customer involvement helps protect and enhance your brand by using customer feedback for product improvements.
- It also reduces other costs related to customer support or marketing and knowledge creation.
There are great enhancements in customer service using social media, but it is also an undeniable fact that customer service or engagement on social media is a new and immature strategy. Few challenges which this new strategy is facing are:
- Team support: When customers are engaged with social media platform for an iphone development company, it becomes the liability of the company to come up with the solutions for complaints, feedback related to apps and concerns from different customers as early as possible. So team co-ordination among different departments is needed not initially, but throughout the service and support process.
- Varied results: The results for the service and support through customer engagement differ for each category of organization. It means the output for the organizations involved in finance differs from those involved in pharmaceuticals. There is no similarity in outputs of deploying customer engagement.
- Quality issues: Because of the presence of a large number of customers on social media, different experiences are reported by them which make it difficult for the servicing team to provide with the quality feedback.
Customer engagement may be quite challenging right now but according to the experts, customer service through social media is the future of customer service strategy.