Sprout Social released their second annual “The Sprout Social Index” recently. Sprout Social is a company who provide social media engagement and analysis tools. They analysed over 160 million public tweets and Facebook updates from just over 18 000 accounts. They then used this data to compile information on how brands are interacting with their customers.
Questions to Brands Doubled in 12 Months
The first point of interest in the document is the amount that we are now all engaging with brands on social media. The number of messages that required an answer has doubled since the first Sprout Social Index was released last year. This dramatic increase in volume could be due to a number of reasons.
Users may believe that it is easier to contact a brand via social media than by telephone or letter writing. If the user already follows the brand on social media then they effectively already possess an open channel of communication with the brand. Users may also think that using social media to search for a brand and making contact is easier than carrying out a search via a search engine and then trying to find a telephone number for the relevant department.
The purpose of the question may also influence the medium of communication used. If I want to know something trivial such as what time a store will open then I can quickly type and send a message rather than being on hold, or worse, having to navigate an interactive voice recognition (IVR) system. This would allow me to carry out other activities while I await a reply.
There may also be the belief held by some users that if they have a complaint and they air it publicly on social media that they will have an increased chance of obtaining, what they see as, a positive outcome.
Brand Response Rates have Fallen
The following sentence may surprise you. According to the Sprout Social Index study brands reply to less than 20% of the questions that they are asked by their customers. The figure for 2014 is 17.3% and that is lower than the figure for 2013 which was 21.9%. So for every five questions that a brand is asked only one, on average, is being answered.
Does this mean that brands do not take social media seriously, that they do not realise what the impact is of poor customer service can be? The answer to both these questions is “No”. Brands are fully aware of the power of social media, that’s the reason that they are on social media in the first place. What brands may be guilty of is not fully understanding how social media is used by their customers, more on this later.
Many large brands are increasing the size of their social media departments and there is a growing industry emerging in both social media marketing and online reputation management. In spite of this brands would appear to be struggling to keep up with the volume of contact that they are getting from their online communities. Although the data used in the Sprout Social Index has not been analysed to look at response rates based on the severity of the issue it can be inferred that many brands are prioritising their responses to customer questions based on this factor.
Average Response Time has Fallen
The good news in the Sprout Social Index is that the time that brands take to respond to questions posed by their customers via social media has decreased by 5% in the last 12 months. So while brands may be answering fewer questions they are at least answering them in a more timely manner. What would you expect to be the average response time to a question posed via social media to a brand? Would you be surprised if I was to tell you that the Sprout Social Index suggests that the average response time is 10.7 hours?
I think that most people would be surprised at this figure but there is a relatively simple explanation for this. Social media departments of major brands are not working during the same time that their customers are asking questions via social media. To get a flavour for this try looking at the Twitter feed for any major brand and look at the reply Tweets that they send out between 9 and 10 in a morning and then look at the time that the original Tweet that they are replying to was sent out and you will see that most of them will have been posted after 6:00pm the previous day.
What Does This Data Mean?
By just looking at the figures it would appear that major brands are not performing well on social media, less than a fifth of questions are being answered and it takes nearly half a day to get an answer. The simplistic view would be to say that brands need to get their act together.
As I have already said many brands are increasing the size of their social media departments but it is not just about numbers of operatives that are replying to queries. Brands need to learn how their fans/followers want to use social media. Customers are familiar with the idea that they can call a customer service line, speak to an operative who may then pass them on to the relevant department who can deal with their query. Along the way each operative will add notes to the customer’s account so that the next person can see what has already transpired.
The brands that will be successful online in the future will be those that successfully find ways to embed social activity inside of their website backend systems and offline systems, such as telephone calls, to provide a seamless way to communicate with their customers. This is about more than just marketing, this is about customer relationships. This does not just mean activity on the current popular social networks of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. These are just the platforms that people are using to communicate with each other and brands. Platforms change over time but the central theme is true, brands must integrate social media into their daily activities.
There are already tools available that help teams to monitor social media activity and allows them to work collaboratively to achieve successful outcomes. I can see these tools being expanded so that they allow communication between members of staff, outside of the social team. Social media will evolve into essential media, tools that help people get tasks done quickly and collaboratively. A combination of social media and project management.
I think that when we get to this stage we will find that brands are able to answer far more questions than they do today. When the World Wide Web emerged just over 20 years ago people said that it would never catch on and they were wrong. Many of those same people said that social media was a fad and they were wrong again. The web and social media are inexorably linked and will evolve further over time, make sure that your business is ready for that evolution.