Share what you know with millions of people
Focus is the best place to turn what you know into remarkable content
0
Can outsourcing social media customer service work?
I've come across a number of companies outsourcing their social media customer service recently within the travel and retail sectors. I'm wondering if this approach actually works? What are the challenges?
Events
- Dos and Don'ts of Small Business Marketing May 29 @ 11 am PT
- Lead Nurturing 202: The Next Generation May 31 @ 11 am PT
- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
Related Activity
2 Answers
Guy,
I believe outsourcing customer service social media can work. Companies that provide these types of services should also provide additional outsourcing solutions such as a complete call center/contact center solution. Challenges can be the cost associated any type of Social Media solutions. An additional challenge can be responses that seem canned will often be met with negative responses from consumers or businesses.
Content rich responses are the best bet for any attempt on social media platforms. If your organizations has thousands of posts, messages and tweets to respond to in a day considering a outsourced and customized solutions can be beneficial while you focus on other areas of your business.
You need to spend time really breaking down the process into several different parts so that you know what exactly to outsource and what to keep in-house. That said it is even more important to outsource to a company whose values are in line with yours because for the most part they will be representing your company on Social Media networks.
That said I do think full disclosure is important, as in you should let it be known whenever you are not the one answering the twitter questions being posed to you. For instance Zappos has a customer service division that focuses on Twitter and they each take turns answering customer questions on Twitter and whenever their shift is over they announce to the Twittersphere who just resumed work. It is awesome and people are okay with it.
As an Entrepreneur you already wear to many hats and cannot do everything. Set the guidelines for how folks engage on social media networks on your behalf, have them disclose when it's not you actually responding and you will be fine. Also mistakes if any are not a bad thing because they are a means for you to learn and improve. 100% of your time VS 80% of leveraging the time of others, I choose the latter.
At the end of the day Social Media is still a media in which you have to learn the rules of the game for marketing which is; first of all provide value for free so that folks get to know, like, trust and eventually (keyword) get to buy from you. The second part is to actively place call to actions for folks to take the step to buy from you when they now trust you.
If you need help creating a strategy on how to outsourcing your social media marketing and also find the right Virtual Assistants to delegate such a task to give me a buzz to schedule your FREE 15mins Social Media Outsourcing Audit session. Cheers!
Answer This Question