Summary : while some businesses are puzzled towards the lack of success of their customer service initiatives on social media, others are trying to find solutions to face the increase of contacts and interactions. Hence the hasty conclusion that social media don’t scale. That’s a big mistake. The only fact that the point of contact is overloaded shows that the media scale. What does not is the bandwidth of the system that prevents from processing all customers requests. This limit is not peculiar to the media but to the processus it supports and that can only be removed by organizational actions. The capacity of the point of contact, should it be called community manager or anything else, can be improved by adding more resources, improving the system, redefining people’s tasks and, most of all, refocusing on exception management.
I often say that organizations that use social media for customer relationship purposes split in two groups : those that won’t take any benefit from it and those that will be overwhelmed with their success. In both cases, things have to be made to improve the situation.
• Those that don’t benefit from their initiative : poor understanding of customer expectations, interaction refusal, absence of a service logic in communication activities.
• Those that are victim of their success : their understood what was the good positioning, had the right proposition of value for their customers…and were so successful that they can’t keep up with the load, what prevent them for keeping their promises and, then, creates a deceptive feeling among their customers that spreads and harm their reputation.
Today, I’d like to focus on this second group.
To find themselves in such a situation that can be described as a “rich people problem”, these businesses understood that beyond community management they had to have a processus approach. Since they offered an actual added value, they met their audience. But, either because of an exceptional event or a linear increase of the workload, they can’t keep up with their commitment anymore.
I’ve been observing something for a couple of months : many organizations that are successful with external facing social media initiatives realize that the internal organization has to be aligned too. Community managers (or whatever you call them) need to interact with internal resources to find solutions to customer problems what implies they can identity and mobilize them. So it’s an expert location issue. If tools and organization don’t make these actions possible, community management becomes a bottleneck where problems pile up without being solved. In conclusion, a scalable channel was used to replicate the same kind of bottlenecks that exist on the traditional channels they were supposed to make up for.
Should iy be executed in a linear or networked way, a processus has a constraint : its bandwidth, determined by the step that at the lowest processing capability. In our example, community management is the constraint of the processus. Said in other words, improving anything in the customer service processus will be without any effect and won’t change anything for customers since the limit is the community manager(s).
Like many airlines, British Airways is using twitter to solve customers problems. Everything works well in normal times but when snow begins to block european airports the switchboard explodes, as this tweet from R. Ray Wang mentioned :
In fact I think that this conclusion is a mistake : this is not the media that doesn’t scale but there a bottleck that limits the scalability of the processus it supports. The only fact that they can’t keep up with tweets is a proof that the media scale, since the amout of incoming messages exploded. What does not scale is the processing.
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
