1-800-SCALABLE: Yes, Social Support Does Scale
I read a lot about how social support from big companies can’t scale.
The thinking – as far as I can reason – goes something like this: There are a rapidly growing amount of customers in the social web, and companies can’t possibly respond to each issue posted in all the different social media channels. At least not in any scalable way over the long term.
Well first of all, let’s compare it to the status quo: Phone support.
Toll-free dialing became available the year I was born, and a few years later, a 52-year-old scientist at AT&T named Roy Weber invented what we now know as the 1-800 number. Companies embraced it soon after and it’s become our one-on-one standard for customer service. The technology routed calls through a computer and call centers began popping up everywhere.
Was this a scalable solution for customer service? Bottle-necking calls and long hold-times until an overworked rep attempts to resolve each issue, one by one… But companies stayed in business even if all the while, they were fostering resentment from consumers. By my estimation, it took about twenty five years before companies started outsourcing overseas. Scalable or not, it has fallen short of its main objective: satisfying customers.
Now, let’s contrast with social support.
One-to-Many
Social support has the one-to-many potential to reach others with answers to similar issues. What if that call-center one-on-one call could be witnessed by thousands of lurker-customers who might have the same problem?
Immortality
Social support will live on in Google search results. Whats the first and easiest thing customers can do when they have a problem? Search. It’s even faster than complaining on Twitter. The call center resolution dies when the caller hangs up.
Respect
Responding with social support shows that a company respects how its customers choose to interact. And more and more, that’s in the social web. As Mike Troiano says: “It is about investing in relationships that create more measurable economic value than they cost.”
How’s that for scale? What do you think? Do you think social media response/support can scale?
UPDATE: Daniel Bingham of MH Group Communications added some great thoughts on scale in the comments of Jeremiah Owyang’s post (that inspired my post here).