Why would a company not use social media for customer service?

Often, the marketing department is in charge of setting up and maintaining social media accounts and therefore, this isn't the right department to handle online customer service.

Whether or not your company wants to use social media for customer service isn't your choice. If your customer is talking about you online, and you aren't there to participate in the conversation, they will have it without you.

If you choose not to use social media to serve your customers, your competition will.

I think Chuck is on the right track. No matter the customer service choice you make, it needs to be sufficiently staffed and responses need to be in a timely manner. In addition, the staff needs to be appropriately skilled to handle those requests. For instance, if it is being used for sales customer service than sales personnel should be handling the requests. If being used for IT helpdesk requests, then skilled IT department personnel should be responding.

In any case, as Chuck mentioned it has to be tested and only instituted when the company is 100% ready and staffed to make the switch. This includes having the social media applications on the devices expected to respond. Without all that being in place, you might be losing customers because they cannot get timely responses. This can be very costly if the company does not already have that infrastructure in place. Another consideration needs to be training for the staff that will handle the applications. You cannot have all your people trying to learn the system as it is in operational, which goes back to testing. Use the testing time to identify any training or expected training shortfalls. Social media may be easy for the younger crowd, but may represent a challenge for the more seasoned staff members, they can learn however, the learning curve may require a little more time, especially if they are not using it in their everyday lives.

Angel makes an excellent point, Social media is growing, and when competing companies begin using social media to handle a variety of customer service requests, it will become a sink or swim scenario. Listen to your customers and be mindful of your competitions tactics, always sound advice.

From an IT perspective, social media represents some levels of concern, make sure your IT security folks are involved in these discussions from the beginning, to ensure a secure and safe environment is created to handle this advancement. Good training can help curve much of these potential risks. Just like email there are threats that affect social media, by keeping the IT Security guys in the loop they can help protect against malicious scripts and attacks.

I agree with the points above. In addition, I see 2 important reasons:

1. Actionable Content: Most social media monitoring systems do not differentiate between actionable comments and non-actionable ones. There is the need for someone to filter out non-actionable comments from the high volume of conversations. Since customer service groups are built for efficiency, this is an issue.

2. Cost Avoidance: This has to do with the differences in ROI. In customer service, much of the effort is around call deflection or creating more of a self-service situation (e.g. FAQs, community responses, etc). Given that most customer service is 1 to 1, this makes sense. However, in social media, these issues are open and often is related to poor customer response. Because of the level of customer frustration and network effects, this should be justified on the basis of customer lifetime value magnified by social network effects.

As a social media monitoring tool provider who has personally read through thousands of posts, it's hard for me to understand why anyone wouldn't take advantage of the opportunity to address customer complaints in an open social media forums. After all, if each person is connected to at least 100 people in their trusted circle, not addressing an issue is an open invitation to your competitor.

Many types of companies would find it virtually impossible to provide appropriate customer service via social media due to privacy legalities. For example, if a person makes a complaint about a doctor missing a diagnosis, the HIPPA laws preclude any discussion of the issue.

Other privacy laws and data security requirements may also impact the ability to respond to a customer service issue in a public forum. Banking, credit cards and any financial issues would not be able to be discussed except in a very general way which is unlikely to address the exact issue. About all one could do is to ask the customer to contact the provider directly to discuss the problem in depth and privately. To others who may be viewing the issues, it seems like an inadequate response although it may be the only legal response that can be given.