Social Media and Cost Cutting ?

Social Media is growing and impacting all domains of business. What I found interesting is how social media can help in decreasing cost of customer service, and thus saving the firm valuable funds.

A huge percentage of customer service calls result from unaware customers and not from technical or software issues. Increasingly however, in the wake of long customer wait lines and repeated touch points, many customers (like me!!) have started looking at online forums and customer reverts to solve some problems without approaching the customer service. This has a positive, and a negative impact. The positive impact is in lower costs of customer service, while the negative impact is that the customer has one less point of touch with the firm, and therefore one less opportunity to reach out with new products, sales and upgrades.

Any sales coming from social media networks will also perhaps be at lower costs of acquisitions, therefore increasing bottom-line. I am not sure, however, if there are exact ways to measure the indirect impact on costs through social media.

Maybe this is why firms have started regularly visiting online forums, chats and other social media networks to access product response and what customers are saying about the service. Its a great opportunity to get a real picture of the response, at a much lower cost than focus groups and sample distributions.