As business continues to adopt social media into overall their communications, providing customer service through these networks is an emerging trend. “Social care” involves providing assistance to customers via platforms such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter. I’ve just finished pulling together a new benchmarking study of seven Fortune 500 companies and what I found most interesting was that despite these brands winning high marks from customers in general, sentiment scores for social customer support were consistently lower than the brand.

In other words, there’s a real opportunity for customer support to boost (if not lead) the overall brand sentiment scores of a company. Done right, social care alone can generate more positive sentiment than the overall brand sentiment. In the study we looked at high profile consumer electronic brands like Apple, Dell and DIRECTV and how they are leading the way with their social care approaches. For example, Best Buy has established a “Twelpforce” of employees who provide support on Twitter, averaging 35 tweets per day. Google’s YouTube channel is home to targeted “how to” videos created by Google employees, which provide quick and easy answers to customer questions. And Apple uses crowd-sourcing techniques to help offload customer support from agents to their customers.

Since social care is still a new concept (we’ve just started #socialcustomer to get a chat started on the subject), here are 5 key steps for companies – big or small – to get a strategy going (more details in the whitepaper, here’s the quick version): 

  1. Build a cross-functional team before you roll out the social care service. If you alone make up the team, start with listening to conversations and figuring out the overall sentiment towards your brand. This will give you a baseline of how active you are today, and how active you may need to be (remember, customers are talking even if you’re not talking with them). Which departments might you need support from?
  2. Recognize which communication style is appropriate for the social channel. Where do your customers hang out? Twitter lists? Facebook Pages? LinkedIn groups? Adapt customer support content to suit those channels.
  3. Create a response map to determine who is responsible for what in your organization. It makes sense for social care to be “owned” by customer service, but you’ll need support from marketing, legal, HR etc. when conversations go viral (see point #1).
  4. Make sure to follow through and follow up. At the very least, acknowledge a question or comment, and provide some direction to more resources, even if that steers the customer offline back to traditional customer support.
  5. Be proactive. Is there a new product or service about to launch? Anticipate the questions and type of support (images? text? video?) this requires, and get content socialized.

There is much to learn from the companies that are rolling out their strategies today. With analysts like Gartner predicting that at least 35% of customer service centers will integrate some form of social capability by 2013, we’ll likely see more brands from a variety of industries offering added CRM. How are you getting your business or client ready?