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.

Social Media Guidelines - A unique Approach

Creating strong, convincing and encouraging Social Media Guidelines sometimes is the hardest. Especially in big companies with many employees and a lot of different departments being involved in corporate social platforms it is difficult to manage and coordinate all activities. Social Media Guidelines help to create a certain level of understanding and support for every employee in a company, by summing up all important factors and guidelines to be followed, if communicating in the social web. Of course, Social Media Guidelines are also of interest to people in a firm, that might have no contact to any online channel at all. A very innovative and encouraging approach of a Social Media Policy has been created by an Australian Department of Justice in 2011: