Cultural Change through Customer Service & Support via Social Media

Many companies, not only in the tourism sector, go through a cultural change these days, encouraging their employees as well as clients to engage on new media platforms as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. This period is already ongoing for quite a while, however, it seems a lot of businesses do struggle with sticking to their decisions made and taking the change process to the next level.

The Customer Service and Support via Social Media and new media platforms can be seen as the beginning of a cultural change process which effects entire business operations as well as each and every employee. I would like to sum up these important steps and give reasons, why this process is so protracted and rather difficult, especially within big businesses and groups.

Step 1: Integrating the Customer Support via Social Media and creating workflows

Having introduced Social Media Support to all your platforms and channels the community learns that support is given not just through e-mail, telephone or mail, but also through new media and mostly quite quicker than on all other channels. As daily requests rise, the support process within your company needs to be optimized in security, quality and speed. Requests need to be placed right at the center of knowledge for every single topic. A structured map can help to visualize every step of a workflow to make sure all topics that might occure are covered.



  

Step 2: Optimizing Workflows and training

Just because you put up workflows, talked to other departments and set up guidelines doesn't mean, that your integration is bulletproof - it needs daily attending and optimization. Find out how strings in your workflow can be speeded up or simplified. Maybe one or two strings can be joined together due to overlapping of themes or structural change within the company. Also make sure that all your contacts in the workflow, know what you are doing and how you do it. Introduce them to your job as well as tasks and let them know that you try to help reduce costs and workload. Offer your help with any problem and make sure you introduce the new topic with guidelines, examples and enough wordings to choose from for the beginning. Also make sure that you know what is going on in those departments, which get confronted with social media requests. Shoulder surfing is a great way to get reasonable information in a short period of time, without annoying anyone.

 Step 3: Making Customers aware of the new Service

After you set up the workflow and got to know your partners in this project, let your customers know that your company offers support via new media. Make sure you introduce all advantages on every platform, for instance in the form of website layers, integration of social plugins, a hint on your contact and service information, etc. Another great way to get the word out there is with your company newsletter.

 Step 4: Getting your Employees to follow the trend

If the communication is out there with your customers but not with your employees within your company, your good intentions are lightly to fail. A cultural change is the only reasonable result to an integration of Social Media Customer Support, but why?
Every person likes to be part of something and a business is only as strong as its employees. Making Social Media available for customer or business purposes only will result in collaborative refusal of the idea by those who are essential to the success of the project. A lot of people have no contact to new media due to their business field, especially within the tourism industry. Introducing new media as part of a cultural change for all has many advantages. A innovative character that spreads through for everyone to follow generates positive attitudes towards the company and enhances loyalty. This won loyalty can be used by any business. It can be converted into word of mouth, positive influencing and even fascination. But therefore Social Media and its ways of communication must be placed right at the center of the company. It could be introduced as following:

1. Introducing Social Media Guidelines
By doing so, you make sure to let everyone know what your aim and goal with Social Media is. You automatically generate interest and give a information about this new tool.

2. Allowing employees to engage on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube
Of course there are many problems by allowing every employee to engage on any platform they chose, for instance server and computer security. However, these difficulties can be managed by amplifying fire walls and increasing the awareness of malware, spam and other dangerous software. Another minus point is the possibility of productivity loss. If your employees are surfing the Internet, are they still working and if they do with the same or worse intensity? This is a question you can probably only answer by researching it yourself. However there are also common solutions for this matter, by creating a certain time frame for people to use Social Media or to implementing a certain time stamp per day for every employee to use up.

3. Asking for Opinions, Input and Content
 Another great way to make sure Social Media is accepted is through asking for ideas and input. Publish travelogues or favorite tips of your employees and let them be part of this project. The maximum results can be created by letting employees contribute to this process and by letting them create and develop their own ideas to drive and truly implement Social Media.

Please, let me know your ideas to drive cultural change within companies and introducing Social Media not only to customers but also to all employees of a business.