The Social Customer Engagement Index White Paper: An Insight For Business

'The Social Customer Engagement Index' is published by The Social Customer and The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, and is accompanied with an illuminating analysis by Brent Leary, an award winning blogger and industry analyst. 118 respondents participated in this survey representing a wide variety of industries and shows how businesses are turning to social media to engage with customers to build better and longer relationships with them; because businesses believe that social media engagement will have a positive impact on overall customer services and objectives. However, the paper highlights that for a company to be successful with its online customers, it must combine its social engagement processes with its traditional customers support methods. This includes ensuring there is complete management buy-in, which is integral to the success of the programme. As management support gives the initiative stability, which over time increases the probability of success.

The report outlines that how a company goes about engaging with its customers online is critical. As apart from a company needing to identify the social platforms its customers use, it also needs to ensure that it has a presence on there. This could also mean engaging with customers through multiple channels. It is imperative for a business to have a minimal investment of customer support staff time committed to engage with customers online because over time this will increase the number of interactions taking place with customers and as a result, the more interactions generate a higher positive impact with customers.  Therefore, the longer a business has been engaging with its customers online the more success it has with customer loyalty. Finally, Facebook and Twitter ranked similarly for effective engagement overall for businesses, yet interestingly Twitter was the preferred choice of smaller companies, while Facebook is favoured by the bigger businesses.

However, it was not the findings of this paper that I was drawn to, but its take on the way ahead for businesses who want to engage effectively with their customers, and cites Google's service, Aardvark as the ideal platform for customer engagement. It lets people use everyday language to describe what information they are looking for and then uses a special algorithm to create a list of the best people to answer the inquiry. Aardvark a social network itself, allows users to connect with other social platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc, helping to improve the quality of connection opportunities. It also works over multiple channels from e-mail, websites etc. Aardvark connects the right people at the right time to the right information; making the focus people-centric and not on the specific channel or network.

This paper goes quite a way towards helping businesses understand that technology is the tool to engage with its savvy online customers, and yet while technology is the enabler, it still comes down to people and it is all about the approaches and processes required to create that significant customer experience.

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