Are organisations failing in their use of social media and apps as customer service channels?

Guy Cranswick of IBRS has brought my attention to a media release about a new report from Fifth Quadrant, a leading Australian customer experience strategy and research consultancy, on social media and smartphone app customer service enquiries.

The report looked at how many Australian consumers had used these channels for customer service enquiries and why they'd used, or not used, them.

The figures are quite dim reading...

The study (of 520 participants) indicated that only 16% of Australian consumers have ever used social media for a customer service enquiry and less than one in 10 Australians had used this channel for customer service in the last three months. Gen Y ran 'hotter', with 29% having ever used social media for a customer service enquiry.

Why didn't people use social media for these enquiries? The survey broke down the reasons as follows (multiple reasons allowed):

• 32% said it isn't personal, 
• 30% said they did not know that they could,
• 30% said they were concerned with security issues,
• 22% said they thought it would take longer than a phone call, and
• 20% said they did not think it would be a good experience. 

The research also looked at smartphone apps and their use in customer enquiries. Here the figures were even lower. Only 15% of Australian consumers had ever used a smartphone application for a customer enquiry (20% amongst Gen Y), and only 8% of consumers had used this channel in the last three months.

The reasons for not using apps were similar to social media:

• 41% said they did not know they could,
• 21% said they thought it would take longer than a phone call,
• 16% said they thought it would make the process slower to talk to a customer service representative,
• 15% said they did not think it would be a good experience, and 
• 13% said that they did not think it would be easy to use.

My immediate reaction was to say that, well, social media and smartphone apps are still very young and immature, both effectively five or less years old as mass communication and engagement channels. It takes time for organisations and customers to adopt their use for customer service.

However, other research suggests that this may not exactly be the case.

Fifth Quadrant’s 2012 Customer Service Industry Market Report (with 120 business participants) found that 69% of Australian based organisations had implemented social media and 23% had implemented smartphone apps for customer service. This is a small sample, but still statistically significant.

In other words, while 69% of organisations will accept customer service enquiries via social media, only 16% of Australians have used this approach and while 23% accept these enquiries via smartphone apps, only 15% of Australians have used these channels.

So if organisations are offering these channels, why do so few Australians use them?

More of Fifth Quadrant's research offers a clue...

How many times should a customer have to contact an organisation to resolve a customer service issue?

Fifth Quadrant reports that the level of 'first contact resolution' (where a customer only needs to contact an organisation once to have their query resolved) is much lower for social media or smartphone app than for phone contacts.

• Phone: 78% of queries handled in one contact
• Social media: 59%
• Smartphone app: 51%

In other words, 41% of people attempting to use social media and 49% of those using smartphone apps will have to contact the organisation multiple times (often resorting to phone) to resolve their query.

This significantly increases the cost of the interaction to the organisation and the customer and reduces customer satisfaction.

So what's the issue? Poor organisational implementation of social media and app channels.

Fifth Quadrant's Director, Dr Wallace said,

“There is no question that social media and mobile channels will be important in the next few years as the percentage of consumers who use these channels for customer service doubles year on year. Rather, it is a question of how effectively organisations address the supporting business processes and skill levels of social media customer service representatives.

The challenge for Australian business is that they typically do not consider Multi-channel Customer Experience as a strategy, hence these new channels lack integration, they do not have accurate revenue and cost models and there is poor data analytics. This has resulted in a sub-optimal channel deployment and as the research shows, ultimately, a sub-optimal customer experience.”

So let's go back to the reasons again...

• There was an awareness issue (social media: 30%; apps: 41%).
  Organisations need to integrate information about the ability to engage them through social media and apps in their promotion, packaging and engagement.
• There was a speed/perceived speed issue (social media: 22% (take longer); apps: 21% (take longer) and 16% (slower)).
  Organisations need to integrate these channels with their other customer contact points, building the protocols and processes to make it faster and easier to engage online than by phone.
• There was an experience/usability issue (social media: 30% (not personal), 20% (experience); apps: 15% (experience) and 13% (easy to use)).
  Organisations need to codesign their channels with customers, putting extensive work into the upfront experiential design to make them an easy to use service with a great user experience. The investment in design is more than offset by the long-term cost savings in moving people from high-cost phone to low cost online service channels.
• There was a security issue (social media 30%).
  Organisations need to take the same actions as ecommerce companies did to reduce this to a minimum, providing context, clear security measures and escalation and rectification mechanisms that assure users that they won't be disadvantaged by any security problems.

Overall, organisations need to run these channels as part of their customer service framework, not remotely via communication, marketing or IT teams.

Want to learn more about the research and report?

See Dr Wallace's blog, Your call.

And here are some of the key findings from Fifth Quadrant’s 2012 Customer Service Industry Market Report (n=120):

Social Media:

1. In Australia, the predominant share of the 22 million daily customer interactions handled by contact centres is still handled by live agents (52%). Despite industry increasing the implementation of social media as a customer service channel, Share of Contact Handling by Social Media channels is 0.2%
2. Amongst organisations that offer social media as a channel for customer service, 67% report that the marketing department is responsible for managing it.
3. 63% of organisations in the study have only had social media as a channel for customer service implemented for 1 to 2 years.
4. Amongst organisations that currently have social media as a customer service channel only 29% reported their contact centre has the ability to escalate a social media query through to a customer support application that links through to an agent.
5. Past three months usage of social media as a customer service channel has doubled in the past 12 months (4% 2011; 8% 2012).
6. The proportion of consumers who believe they will be using social media more often in the future has also nearly doubled from 4% in 2011 to 7% in 2012. 
7. When asked whether they had received a response from an organisation via a Social Media network to comments they had made through Social Media, only 7% of consumers reported that they had. About 5% of consumers claim to have received essential information posted via a Social Media network. 14% of consumers report they have received information from an organisation via social media about new products and services. 

Smartphone Apps:

1. Amongst organisations that offer smartphone apps as a channel for customer service 50% report that the marketing department is responsible for managing it, with a further 33% reporting that IT is responsible.
2. 50% have only had smartphone apps as a channel for customer service implemented for one to two years, with 33% reporting smartphone app has been available for less than 12 months. 
3. Amongst organisations that do not currently offer smartphone app as a channel for customer service, 25% report they have no plans to. 
4. Further to the existing 8% of consumers who have used a smartphone app for customer service, a further 33% of consumers report that they are likely to use a smartphone app for a customer service enquiry in the next 12 months. 
5. Amongst Gen Y consumers, 29% report that they will be using smartphone apps for customer service issues more often in the next 1-2 years. This is significantly higher compared to Baby Boomer (8%) and Silent (4%) generations.

Read full post...

View summary...

How will augmented reality shape society's future and the expectations of government?

Augmented Reality, or AR, involves the projection of information onto our physical landscape through some form of assistive device, such as the heads-up displays (HUDs) used in many aircraft, the use of a mobile device with a camera to photograph a location and add information or the upcoming Google Goggles, which promise a wearable AR experience.

There's many, many potential uses for this approach.

Doctors could monitor a patient's vitals and view an x-ray or CAT image over the area they are operating on, emergency workers could see a map of a building's interior, which tells them where to go to get around obstacles or even where people are trapped, business people and politicians could access public details of individuals they meet so they're never short of a name or small talk, street workers could view all the conduits under a road, or builders the wires and pipes in walls and floors in order to guide their activities.

Even tourists could use AR productively, viewing historical information on landmarks and tour routes as they travel around a city or country.

The potential for global information at one's eyeballs may even be a more profound leap forward than the internet's now established concept of global information at one's fingertips.

This isn't even new technology. Our grandparents were the first to have access to augmented reality devices, before computers, microwave ovens or mobile phones, albeit in a limited way.


The first HUD was invented in 1937, when the German air force developing the reflector sight, an approach that used mirrors to reflect a gunsight modified by airspeed and turn rate onto the glass in front of a fighter pilot's eyes. This improved their accuracy and effectiveness in air combat and began a race by other nations to develop similar approaches.

However the first electronic HUD wasn't created until the mid 1950s, when the British introduced the Blackburn Buccaneer, a low-flying bomber with the world's first inbuilt HUD. While the prototype flew in 1958, the production aircraft didn't enter service until 1968 and served until 1994, used as late as in the Gulf War.

It was noticed that the HUD improved the general abilities of pilots, despite being originally for targeting purposes only, and it was expanded to provide a range of additional information to help pilots.

The modern HUD was developed by 1975, by a French test pilot, featuring a standard interface to aid pilots switching between planes. Around the same time HUDs were first expanded into use on civilian planes and in 1988 the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme became the production car to feature a HUD, followed around ten years later by the first motorcycle helmet offering a heads-up display.

Experimental HUDs have been developed for ski goggles, scuba divers, personal battle armour and for fire fighter goggles as well as many other applications, with some of these very close to production ready.

Augmented reality is being integrated into computer, console or mobile games, many of which feature some form of virtual HUD. Our televisions display information on the screen about programs and channels and our mobile devices, with the right apps, can use their cameras to place additional information on real-time video.

With the range of uses for the augmented reality supported by these devices and the widespread exposure society has now had to the concept, the next step will be very interesting.

Once appropriate mobile augmented reality devices comes onto the market, such as the product Google is working on, there will be a market ready to adopt them. 

How will they be used in society? What policy challenges will they create?

A group of Israeli film makers has produced a seven-minute long short-film, Sight, which showcases some of the potential uses of augmented reality and some of the challenges and risks that societies may have to face.

Read full post...

View summary...

How Asia is taking the Gov 2.0 lead and Australia needs to look north for inspiration

Over the last few days in Singapore I've had the opportunity to have some very interesting discussions with government and academic representatives about the state of egovernance and Government 2.0 across Asia - perspectives we all too rarely hear in Australia.

This is a major shame for government officials in Australia, who are not exposed as regularly to the fantastic insights and practices from countries that are, in some areas, leading Australia in their online engagement.

For example, South Korea has been rated first in egovernment globally since 2010 by the UN in their bi-annual E-government survey. In the latest 2012 result, Australia is ranked 12th, third in Asia-Pacific behind South Korea (1st) and then Singapore (10th) but ahead of New Zealand (13th) and Japan (18th).

I was fortunately enough to speak with a representative of the Ministry in South Korea responsible for their egovernment program and it is clear why they have achieved that position.

With support from their President down, a mandated government CIO role, long-term development strategy over more than ten years focusing on both supply (IT infrastructure) and demand (usability and access), the commitment of 1% of the government's budget to the provision of e-services and infrastructure and a unified whole of government change program to educate and support public servants, South Korea has hit the mark on the right way to implement a major change in national institutions.

Other countries in Asia are also being dynamic and adapting to their increasingly vocal online audiences.

Malaysia, where around 60% of the population have internet access, has over 12 million Facebook users and roughly 1.6 million active Twitter users - similar to Australia's 11.5 million and 2 million respectively. With a promise made in 1998 by the government to keep the internet censor-free, Malaysian government Ministers and Departments are making broader use of blogs for civil engagement than their counterparts in Australia.

Brunei, a small developed Asian nation that some Australians may not even be aware of (as it has only 400,000 people and a land area roughly twice that of the ACT), collaborated with South Korea to recently launch an E-Government Innovation Centre (eG InC.) designed to help the government achieve the Brunei 2035 target to establish a knowledge-based economy. The eG InC. was recognised in the 2012 Futuregov awards, winning the citizen engagement award.

I also learnt this trip about Singapore's appointment of a Chief of Government Communications, a new role created from 1 July 2012 designed to support co-ordination, information and resource sharing across the communications teams within Singaporean national government departments.

The Singaporean government created this role after the ruling party received the lowest vote in their history and recognised that government communication was an area that could be improved to better serve citizen needs.

Some might note similarities to the situation in Australia, if not in the governance solution.

One of the initiatives launched since this appointment has been a national conversation with Singaporeans regarding their issues and expectations towards 2030, involving a year long process to engage the entire nation in identifying major concerns and trends which the government can influence.

These are only some of the stories I've heard over the last few days, but are representative of the steps forward being taken in Asia to adopt digital and web 2.0 technologies to improve governance and drive future productivity and national wellbeing.

While Australia has many notable achievements in the Government 2.0 area, and I was able to share a number of them with people from across the region on this trip, there is much for Australian governments to learn from the approaches being taken in nations to our near north, as well as from those far to our west such as in Europe and the Americas.

With the release of the Australian Government's Australia in the Asian Century white paper - which was favourably commented on by many I've met this trip - it is time for public servants to look north for innovations and inspirations, as well as west.

Read full post...

View summary...

Liveblogging 'Future Citizen Engagement for Government Forum Asia 2012' Day 1

Over the next few days I am in Singapore at Liquid Learning's Future Citizen Engagement for Government Forum Asia conference.

I'll be liveblogging the presentations today and may liveblog parts of tomorrow, when I am chairing, speaking and on a panel.

Read full post...

View summary...

OpenAustralia Hack(s)fest on FOI - for hackers, media, activists & FOI gurus

The OpenAustralia Foundation will be holding the first Australian Hack(s)fest as part of the countdown to the launch of their new FOI assistance site, designed to make it easier for ordinary Australians to put in FOI requests to Commonwealth agencies.

The event, being held in Sydney at Google's office, will be held on the weekend of 17-18 November.

For more details and to register, visit: www.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/2012/11/05/youre-invited-to-our-freedom-of-information-hacksfest/

Read full post...

View summary...