Social Customer Service

Social customer service is the intersection between customer service and social media. It connects your customers with people, both inside and outside of your organization, and with the information they need to solve problems and make better decisions. Social customer service empowers your customers to crowdsource support, share knowledge, discuss new ideas and connect with peers using today's most popular social tools and social networks.

Why does social customer service matter to your business? Your customers expect it. Today, 70% of online consumers expect businesses to try harder to provide excellent customer service online. And, the bottom-line impact of using social media for customer service is more than just cost savings; it influences buying decisions. A recent survey of tech buyers uncovered that customers use online resources to find 70% of the information they need before ever engaging with a sales person.

You know why social customer service is important, but how do you implement it in the real world? Here are some key ways that you can use online communities for social customer service that lowers costs and drives revenue:

• Social self-service: providing self-service through peer-to-peer support forums and online FAQs saves you money but it also saves your customers time. Telligent dynamically scores community content and only surfaces the most relevant information, delivering your customers the right answers in real-time.
• Expert discovery: current customers and potential buyers seek expertise to make business decisions. Online communities powered by Telligent recognize and reward people who contribute high quality content and showcase their expertise where others can find it with ease.
• Knowledge sharing: online resources like discussion forums, product documentation and how-to videos help customers find solutions and solve problems. Telligent makes it easy for people to discover and share interesting content with familiar social networking tools such as activity streams, #hashtags, likes and @mentions.
• Crowdsourcing new ideas: online communities link customers, partners, potential buyers and your employees together. Telligent makes it possible for you to source new ideas and get feedback for product improvements from the entire community through forums, ratings and reviews, polls and even private groups for trials and beta testing.
• Mobile community: exceptional customer service knows no boundaries. Telligent makes activity streams, documents, support forums, polls, videos and more accessible from any mobile device.
• Empowering your sales force: recent studies show that technology buyers find 70% of the information they need using web and community resources before they engage a salesperson. With online communities, your marketing and sales teams can listen and respond to conversations that are happening online in order to gain a better understanding of your customers' business needs while at the same time gain access to qualified buyers.
• Leveraging your data: with Telligent, community analytics are available directly within your online community as well as from a dashboard for role-based viewing by customer care, product management, sales and marketing team members. Key metrics deliver insights into community health and vitality, service responsiveness, content effectiveness and networking strength – the essential indicators that your social customer service community is achieving business objectives.
• Making social portable: community isn't just a destination; it's a social engagement path that connects you with customers in the places that matter most to your business. With Telligent, you can add social engagement – ratings and reviews, comments, likes and @mentions – to your online content and create community wherever your customers are.

What about Twitter and Facebook? Social customer service brings together emerging social channels and traditional channels. With the right social platform, you can combine conversations that are happening in social networks and other online properties into an online community that you own.

Even better? Telligent's enterprise social platform not only powers online communities with a complete suite of social tools, it also provides integration with your other enterprise software for CRM. That's right, you can give your customer care team a complete picture of the customer experience by connecting your online community with Salesforce.com, Twitter, Facebook and much, much more.