A recent experience with my bank had me thinking again about the use of social media in customer service.

The large number of high profile social media customer service disasters experienced by companies such as United, Comcast and HP make it plain that any company whose consumer products could conceivably require customer service issues must have a process in place to identify and address customer service issues in social media.

While previously a dissatisfied customer might tell ten friends about his experience, a dissatisfied customer using social media can tell thousands. Even worse, the online record of the complaint stays on the Internet eternally for all to see.

The basic strategy of a social media customer service program should be to:

1. Identify and address all customer service complaints identified online as quickly as possible.
2. Contact the consumer directly within the medium that the complaint was posted. This requires dedicated personnel enabled with social media monitoring technology
3. Quickly take the resolution process out of the public channel. Depending on the platform the complaint was posted on, ask the consumer to send either a Facebook email (Facebook), Direct Message (Twitter)  or email (YouTube, Flickr or Blog comment) with a brief description of their issue and a phone number where they can be reached.
4. Link your social media monitoring function to your company’s CRM system to route the problem to the correct department for resolution.
5. These issues must be prioritized and resolved in a timely manner to avoid further negative social media commentary from the user.
6. The ideal result is that the response so delights and surprises the consumer that the consumer praises the company for resolving complaint within the same social medium that was used to lodge the complaint.
7. Don’t use an automated response system or direct the consumer to call a customer service line – the reason they are complaining online is probably because that system already failed them.

While these basic steps will be sufficient for many companies for the time being, companies also need to plan for the future.

The growing number of consumers using social media as well as the high profile successes some customers have achieved by complaining online means that an increasing number of your customers will be using social media to resolve (and complain about) customer service issues in the near future. You need to think about how your social media customer service operation will scale.

While scaling this program cost-effectively is a concern, there are also some advantages that can make social media customer service programs scale better than you might think.

1. Multitasking: unlike phone support, online customer service representatives can have online conversations with more than one person at a time. Many companies have had great success with instant message-based customer service on their company website for this reason.
2. Elimination of customer holding time: Probably the biggest thing that gets customer service interactions off on the wrong foot is forcing the customer to wait on the phone for 15 minutes to speak to a real person. By the time the interaction happens the customer’s increased irritation has decreased their satisfaction with the company interaction, regardless of the outcome of the call. In contrast, in my recent experience with my bank on Twitter, I DM’d them my problem along with my phone number, and an hour later a service rep called me back with the solution already worked out. Even though it took longer to receive a solution than most telephone customer service interactions, my satisfaction with the interaction was much higher because my time was not wasted. Once I received the initial response via Twitter I knew the company was looking into my problem, so I was content to wait for them to solve it while I went back to my work. I would not have had the same reaction if I was on hold on the phone. My bank also benefited because the only person that had to spend time on the phone with me was the person who had the power to help me.
3. Easy prioritization: Urgent issues/high priority customers can be identified and triaged immediately.
4. Customer service process improvement: The most expensive customer service issues, both from a staff time and restitution perspective, are those where the system you have in place has failed and the customer has escalated the complaint outside of the usual customer service channels. A well-run social media customer service program can help you to identify areas where your current customer service process is failing, to make it more efficient.

Companies need to consider more than the upfront costs compared with outsourced call-center support. Social media proliferation has made it far too risky to farm out customer support to an offshore call-center and hope for the best.

Today’s social-media savvy consumers are not going to go quietly away when your company’s customer service process fails them – they will use social media to make their voice heard on a scale that your company cannot afford. The only question is whether your company will be ready to efficiently and effectively deal with them in social media, or will the issue become a communications crisis before your company acts.