It has now been proved beyond doubt that providing good social customer care can give brands a definite edge over its rivals. Following that, devoted brands are attaching a lot more attention to social customer care.
Data collected by Social Bakers proves that socially devoted brands get 3.5 times more interaction on Facebook (which means 90,000 interactions per page) and 5 times more replies on Twitter as compared to brands which do not. Besides that, the pages of top 8% devoted brands were seen to get 65% questions of all brands during the quarter ended September 2014. Telecom industries were seen to fare better than all other industries in that respect along the two leading social platforms- Facebook and Twitter- followed by airlines. Retailers were seen to be the worst performers.
In a shocking revelation, however, it has been revealed that while brands with an active presence do take care to answer all their consumer queries, they take an unduly long term to respond to them. While 95% of the brands were seen not to engage in any dialogue with their fans at all, the ones which did bother took as long as 1,994 minutes (more than 33 hours) to do so!
A Question Response Time (QRT) of more than a day, we believe, is not just bad. It is pathetic!
QRT has gone up from the already bad 24 hours to 33 hours+ during the last three months
The waiting time got longer by nearly 29% over the last three months, though the brands improved by almost 5% in terms of Question Response Rate (QRR).
To get more out of their presence on social channels, the brands need to work on pushing up their QRR while at the same time striving hard to bring down the QRT. As already pointed out, socially devoted brands have been seen to get 3.5 times the level of interaction on their Facebook pages. Which makes the Questions Responded minus Ignored (QR-I) the main metric which needs to be studied here.
The Royal Dutch Airlines, KLM, towers above all others with a QR-I of more than 20,000. None of the other four brands in the top five even came close to KLM.
The others on this list were Robi Axiata Limited (Bangladesh), Grameenphone (Bangladesh), Djuice Pakistan (Pakistan) and Banglalink Mela (Bangladesh). Interestingly, four out of the top five brands were seen to be from the Southern part of Asia.
Now, all the South Asian brands belong to the telecom sector which has already been proved to be among the best-performing verticals on this front.
KLM has laid down a model which all leading brands must emulate in order to entrench themselves at the top.
The two giant Asian economies, China and India, are hugely populated too and though they have the largest number of mobile subscriber bases, Bangladesh and Pakistan (combined) are second on the list.
The telecom companies in these two hugely populated countries especially sleeping giants need to take a cue from those functioning in much smaller and often seen to be struggling economies like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Incorporating better customer care policies will help them win over customers’ hearts and loyalty. Since these regions are the hotbeds of mobile activity, this is an area they cannot afford to ignore.
The Most Socially Responsive Countries in the World
Pakistan, Netherlands and Germany were seen to be three most responsive countries in the world during the last quarter.
Though they were the most responsive, the response time taken by these countries was much longer than the world’s fastest country, Poland. Five of the ten fastest responding brands from Poland (all from the telecom sector) were seen to have a QRT of less than 80 minutes. Which, besides being head and shoulders above the global average, is commendable!
The Least Responsive Countries in the World
The dubious honour of being the chart leaders on the least responsive list went to Brazil, United States and Hong Kong.
While that would give the message that being socially responsive should be one of the major thrust areas for any company, that is not the truth. Had it been so, all brands would allot a substantial portion of human and fiscal resources in this area and then lie back, waiting for the best to happen to them.
Customer care adoption has social lags.
The very large pages or bigger communities were obviously placed at a vantage point.
Only three industries were found to have 10% or more brands which were socially devoted.
In addition to that, “Only 18% of the largest Pages were Socially Devoted, and fewer than 2% of all brand Pages with between 1 and 99,999 fans were.”
There are several reasons which explain the relatively poorer performance of brands with smaller social pages on Facebook. One of the main reasons being the limited resources at their disposal. Not just financial crunch, but also a shortage of manpower. Smaller brands or firms do not have an adequate budget or human resources to help take their social interactions beyond a certain level.
There is no denying the fact a better level of interaction with the consumers across the social platforms goes a long way in enhancing the company’s image and establishing it as a titan.
The writing for all brand owners is on the wall: You need to respond. And respond fast!
They will need to employ monitoring and community management tools which can help them maximize their social customer service efforts. The ones that pay heed to these findings will get the best results from their presence across networking sites.
