If there's one thing this year has demonstrated, it's that we live in a social-first world. When Spredfast took a look at how this is playing out in real life, we found that 93% of all brand content isn't promotional - it's real conversations with consumers. Let that sink in. It means that, for businesses, being responsive is table stakes, and consumers increasingly expect that social will offer a better experience than email or phone.
That's a tall order. Some brands with high customer interaction, like retailers and travel and hospitality companies, can field more than 10,000 engagements a day. And nearly half of those people expect a response within an hour. But, if businesses can get social customer care right, the bottom-line benefits are enormous. The Harvard Business Review found that the average call center interaction costs $6 to resolve, and an email can cost as much as $5. On social, it's $1.
At the same time, the social networks see social customer care as an opportunity, and they have made it easier than ever for a person to start a conversation with a business. This means greater and greater volume and pressure on the business to deliver a satisfying resolution. Those that do not will be left out of the conversation.
To do that, businesses need a social customer care solution that breaks down the silo between care and marketing. And that solution needs to harness the power of a full-featured social media management platform to deliver more capabilities and more data to care agents. This means real-time social monitoring and routing, purpose-built interfaces for Agents and Managers, a complete view of the customer relationship, an easy way to spot and manage crises, and social customer care-specific metrics that help businesses spot bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies.
Social is the fastest-moving industry in the history of marketing. We are at an inflection point, a point when conversations with brands will start to eclipse one-way broadcast messages from brands. Now is the time to get ready for that change. Now is the time to embrace an exceptional customer experience. Adapt or be disrupted.