“Thank you for holding. Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold and the next available agent will answer your call.” – According to a poll conducted by Time magazine more than half of American callers wait on hold for 13 or more hours each year when reaching out to companies for customer service. On email, they fare little better, with slow responses, inadequate information, and “do not reply” emails.
Until a few years ago, customer-business interactions hid behind the veil of a business’s systems, and customers could do little but wait, sometimes only hoping for an answer to their questions, with little recourse when businesses chose not to respond. Social media has since brought these interactions into public visibility, amplifying customer expressions of both frustrations and pleasant experiences across channels like Twitter and Yelp – and the impact on businesses has been significant.
Top brands have been quick to notice and leverage the power of that visibility. According to an informal study conducted by the BBC, companies with a social media presence are now both more likely to respond, and faster at responding when Tweeted, instead of when emailed. Still, for every company leveraging social media and doing so effectively, far more choose to avoid it, or to take too casual an approach to social media.
According to a poll conducted by Maritz Research company, roughly 70% of customer tweets go unanswered. Unanswered tweets create a perception of inattentiveness to customer needs, and can damage a brand in the eyes of direct customers and the thousands that turn to social media for opinions and insights. Driven by rapidly increasing customer adoption, then, social media has transformed from a nice-to-have to a must-have to provide excellent customer service. Excellence in marketing and sales, now too, depend on social involvement.
Whether it’s for support, marketing or sales, Vtiger’s new social integration has tools to help organizations identify and focus on what matters, engage more quickly, and measure impact.
Support: deliver more reliable, faster social service
Customers are flocking to Twitter for support, and more than half of those on Twitter deem response times in excess of an hour unacceptable. With 60% of those dissatisfied taking “unpleasant actions to express dissatisfaction”, keeping response times down is essential.
Responding to a tweet within an hour, however, takes both continuous monitoring, and tools to mount a quick and effective response. This is where Vtiger steps in
Turn Tweets into Tickets + Contacts
When a member of a support team receives a call, they create a ticket. When they receive an email for support, they create a ticket. With social CRM, when a tweet is received that should be addressed by the a business’s support team, it can be transformed into a ticket. This ensures that it doesn’t get lost in the fray, and no matter how much customer engagement is required.
Research customer histories in seconds, not minutes
When it takes minutes to pull together customer histories and mount an effective response to questions, you’re doing something wrong. That’s what happens when Tweets, support tools, and customer histories are split between applications. Vtiger links tickets to customers, and lets you search histories in a single click. This means that time is spent solving problems, instead of pulling information together.
Marketing: Strengthen your brand and find new sales opportunities
Mention notes that over 30% of all mentions – your company’s name or product’s name, exclude companies twitter handle and missing on tweets that exclude @ mentions could be very easy for your marketing or support teams. This means the number of tweets missed is in fact the number of opportunities missed and/or number of unhappy customers. So, it’s highly important to track down tweets that are not directed to you.
Research market and competitive insights
My search streams option in the Social module lets marketing teams search and follow conversations, hashtags, competitors, and other subjects of interest through streams. This means seeing an up to date feed that includes conversations about your products, competitor products, or industry trends.
Turn Tweets into Leads or Contacts + Opportunities
For example, the marketing team of a BMW dealership could create a stream containing tweets with keywords that indicate interest in purchasing a new car. The marketing team could then filter through those tweets and follow up directly to qualify interest, or create a lead for the sales team to follow up on.
Sales: Know your leads and customers better, Develop a better understanding of customer interests
To deliver value to a lead, and eventually win a deal, a sales representative must know who he or she is trying to create value for. Vtiger’s new Twitter integration gives a business’s sales team visibility into their contacts’ social histories, enabling them to effortlessly and continuously see each contact in their native environment.
Observing social engagements can confer a number of benefits to almost any industry. In the travel industry, for example, visibility into customer travel plans, food and accommodation preferences lets an agency or other business pre-emptively market and sell targeted packages that are more likely to draw interest on the first engagement, breaking down barriers and increasing conversion rates, all without ever directly surveying customers.
See what your leads and customers are talking about
In Vtiger, once a lead or contact’s Twitter handle is added to their record, any Tweet related to that contact or tweet becomes visible in the new Social History widget. This provides salespeople with unprecedented visibility into their lead and contact’s social activity, letting them better understand customer needs and better identify opportunities to provide value.
Interested in learning more about the social module or any other feature in Vtiger? Feel free to ask us for a demo or to email us your questions at [email protected]
