TORONTO – Social media has become a business transformation tool that not only helps to engage consumers but also lower customer service costs. That was the underlying message during a panel discussion about social networking on the opening day of the Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto.
“If we do it right, there are cost savings to the company,” said Keith McArthur, vice-president of social media for Rogers Communications. “So we can do something that improves our reputation, improves our customer experience and makes our customers happier, and also lowers our costs. I think that’s a huge win-win.”
McArthur explained that Rogers has thousands of employees working its call centres, but only about a dozen employees answering customers’ questions through social media (McArthur himself is @RogersKeith on Twitter), which makes it difficult to do a direct cost comparison. However, Rogers has found the number of customers who say their question was answered when it’s done through social media is much higher, which means they are less likely to need to call back to get their issue resolved, he explained.
In addition, social media creates the opportunity for unassisted channels of support where customers help each other, which provides a clear return on investment to Rogers, McArthur said. Rogers’s social media group works with all departments across the organization, not just customer service, to create strategies for using social media in the areas of marketing and employee recruitment, as two examples.
Jacob Glick, senior policy counsel at Google Canada, cautioned some people in the industry make the mistake of thinking social networking is something separate from the rest of the Internet. “Social is a pervasive layer that is going to be integrated into many forms of Internet communication, and you’re not going to see it segregated,” Glick (@jacobglick) said.
However, the challenge will be measuring the impact of incorporating social media into business strategies. “If you are not measuring what you’re doing, you won’t know whether you’re succeeding or failing,” he noted, adding that companies need “metrics that indicate a real action in the real world that is driving a particular result”, such as customers buying a product or subscribing to a service.
Glick said there’s a danger of becoming enamoured with the latest cool thing – social media, in this case. “I want to remind us when we’re fascinated by the new shiny object that it still has to deliver results,” Glick said.
Dave Caputo, president and CEO of Sandvine, offered some statistics on social media consumption via mobile devices. According to Sandvine, the average smartphone user consumes 30 MB of social media content per month. About 50% of mobile devices that are Facebook-enabled communicate with Facebook every hour, Caputo said.
In addition, social networking traffic across all geographies represents between 5% to 12% of all network traffic on the Internet, Caputo said. Twitter by itself generates less than 1% of total bytes transferred on the Internet, but it’s still one of the top 20 Internet applications, Caputo added. Photo uploads from mobile devices is driving a noticeable increase in Internet data traffic, generally speaking, Caputo said.
Caputo spoke about Sandvine’s experience working with a Latin America mobile service provider that now markets a number of low-cost monthly plans that provide unlimited email, chat or social networking connectivity. “The killer application for mobile data is cost certainty,” Caputo said. “People want to know what their bill is going to be at the beginning of the month or at the end of the month, if they’re pre-paid or post-paid.”
