Being socially devoted to your customer care increases ROI

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Posted 22 June 2012 11:37am by Jan Rezab with 13 comments

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I had to come back to Econsultancy and write about this, as 1 year ago I wrote the article: Companies respond to just 5% of question on social media. Get it? Only 5% of all questions got answered. REALLY crazy!

Well, the market has evolved a bit, and based on our study, companies now respond 30% of all user questions.

This week we have launched a new standard called Socially Devoted. Its a new standard for social care, which is based on these principles:

a) You have to be an open company. Open up your walls, and your companies to feedback

b) You have to respond your fans. Respond at least 65% of all questions in social media

c) You have to respond quickly. Responding in the average 20+ hours won't do it. You have to try and respond in a matter of minutes. Thats how to do it. 

After defining it, we have done a study on over 10 000 brand pages on Facebook (for now, we will look at Twitter later), and analysed their wall post questions (the place where people actually place the most questions). 

As we dug deeper into this data, we understood that Telecom companies, Airlines, and Finance are the most responding categories. (See chart below, but that for example the Automobile category is really a disaster, responding the smallest amount of customers).

A really interesting statistic for example in the airline industry is, that some of the low-cost airlines like easyJet really do social marketing responses much better than their traditional peers. As I mentioned, British Airways chose to turn off their walls, which is a little crazy. 

Another fun fact is, that non-profit organizations respond much better than for-profit organization. Thats kind of interesting, and something to really stop and think about if you are a marketer and your profit business is performing worse than non-profits.  

One mobile operator, Vodafone, has actually proved that not only can they save quite a lot of money in social media (contact deflection in other, more expensive channels), they can also make new revenue through up selling the customers through social channels. Thats amazing! 

Its not a question of if you should do customer care in social media, its only a question of when and how. Some companies still choose to actually close their walls for user comments, including large companies like British Airways, American Express, and Microsoft. 

You do communication in marketing to get attention, but when you get that attention, you choose to ignore it. Amazing...

We would like to call up to brands, start responding to questions in social media. Its what you have to do, its naturally what you will do and everyone  knows it. Why not start now? Are you Socially Devoted?