It’s great to offer telephone, web chat, email, SMS text/instant messaging, company LinkedIn page, company Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, mobile- apps... (the list goes on).
A lack of engagement options (especially when compared to the competition) will give the appearance that your service is sub-standard.But your staff must have an agreed definition of acceptable response handling, standard across all channels.
For example: A new telephone enquiry. One person believes a four hour response with correct info is fine, another believes four minutes is needed. On social media, 30 minutes by one member of staff, 30 seconds by another!Under-deliver on expectations and customers and prospects will share their poor experiences with their peers.
This can be thousands of contacts in a simple tweet, venting frustration and trashing your brand and services.This gets re-tweeted or forwarded to contacts of their contacts, and it’s gone viral: “This organisation is clueless.”
The answer is to deploy a comms platform which tracks and measures all media automatically, with KPI dashboards displaying in red or green whether staff are responding to agreed SLAs, and alerting management if not. Can you afford lost enquiries and bad publicity?