Partner Article

How consumers interact with brands

Nick Peart, EMEA Marketing Director for Zendesk writes about how technology and social media has impacted the way consumers interact with brands.

The social network boom has created a new revolution in how consumers react with brands, companies or organisations. The reach and immediacy of Twitter & Facebook has made the voice of the customer an extremely powerful force. Bad experiences can quickly snowball into online customer uprisings leading to big PR disasters.

We now expect to reach companies from anywhere, at any time, and through any device that we choose, from iPads, iPhones, and Blackberry’s to Android smartphones. While it used to be expected that enquiries would be answered within a couple days, we now expect answers within hours, if not minutes.

Brands, large or small, global or local are facing increasing amounts of pressure to deliver a better, quicker service over a broader range of channels including social, email, and phone. Customers expect to get service at any time of the day or night and assume that this should and will happen. Studies by Edison Research have indicated that 19% of Twitter users seek customer service via Tweets. With more than 200 million users, this means 38,000,000 customers are seeking service via Twitter.

As is often the case, tech-savvy independents are the first to embrace new technologies and communication channels. Larger, more traditional organisations are now finding that they need to develop new customer service strategies or else smaller, more nimble businesses may leave them in the dust and take their customers with them.

As a result, many companies have made the move to cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. These have proven to be the fastest and most cost-effective alternative to updating on-premise packages. More importantly, these new cloud-based solutions are specifically designed for multi-channel customer service.

On the hardware side, customers and employees do more and more on mobile devices than ever before. In fact, the mobile revolution seems like an unstoppable force with more than 5.3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide (by the way, that’s 77 percent of the world’s population).

Today the mobile consumer and the mobile workforce are rapidly converging. Whether officially sanctioned or not, many customer service employees already make use of their smart phones, iPads, and personal accounts like Twitter and Facebook to solve their customers’ problems because these channels make their jobs easier.

By supporting all of these channels, customer service organisations have an amazing opportunity to deliver a truly memorable ‘consumer experience’ with the right processes and tools in place. If the last update you made to your customer service was the addition of a support@ email address, then it is probably time to seriously reassess your customer service strategy. Happy customers are loyal customers who not only keep coming back for more, but also spread the word about your company and products. And that means more business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Zendesk .