Cloud Talk

Here's the scene:

A celebrity walks into a restaurant, gets bad service, throws a tantrum and yells - "Do you know who I am?". The implication is that Mr. Big-Shot is really important and the manager had better treat him right otherwise he'll spread his negative perception of the restaurant to his entire fan-dom (btw, is this a legit word?). In many instances, the manager acquiesces and offers to "make things right".

It's a lesson is how social influence can impact customer service.

This same dynamic is at work in customer service today except that such influence is no longer restricted to the likes of the rich and powerful. Thanks to social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, the power to threaten and gripe our way to better customer has been democratized. There are countless stories like that from USA Today of Wes Harper who took his complaints of Comcast to Twitter and got the customer service response he demanded.

That scenario is replayed thousands of times a day with companies that have leveraged social media as a listening post for customer issues that emerge in real time. And, it's not just large B2C companies that are doing this. Smaller companies, B2B companies, and especially forward thinking companies that thrive on delivering top notch customer service, have taken to social media channels in droves.

Question: What's the next big step in how customer service can leverage social media?

Answer: Tiering customer service response based on social media influence.

It's only natural. Managing customer issues is hard work and if you're swamped and overloaded, whose issues are you going to address first - David Meerman Scott's (33,546 followers) or mine with my measly 134 Twitter followers?

The point is simply this: social influence matters in customer service and the use of social media will increasingly change the dynamics of how customer service. Being able to measure social media influence is going to be part and parcel of how Customer Service 2.0 will work.

And, it's not as straightforward to figure out as you might think. For instance, I may only have a measly 134 followers but what if one of my followers is my brother-in-law who is a well known social media geek with 20K followers? For this to happen, we need tools that can measure both influence and engagement in a sophisticated but consistently reliable way.

So, when it comes to leveraging social media for customer service, you could think of three stages of progression -

Not Engaged - not using social media channels for customer

Social Media as Customer Communication Channel - using social media as listening channel for customer service issues and responding in real time

Social Media as Quality of Service Channel - delivering quality of customer service based on social media influence and engagement profiles, hence optimizing customer service investment for maximum impact.

I don't like to think about a future where I'll get a lower level of service because of my measly follower count on Twitter .... maybe I'll get to work on tweeting more this weekend.