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Vikram
Freshdesk announces Support for Facebook Messages: From Walls to Messages with Your Identity Intact
May 15th, 2012 
You might have already noticed the Facebook “messages” capability for business pages.
So far individuals could go all undercover and take their private conversations offline through messages, but the only way to talk to a business on Facebook was on its wall. In public view!
Customer identity gets more secure, thanks to Facebook messages
With Freshdesk, businesses can already support customers through their Facebook wall. Now they can take their support to private messages as well. So what does this mean for your customers and your business?
Brand lovers can finally be discreet in their critique: Facebook has been a great place for customers to voice their opinions with the world. Now as customers talk to brands directly as well, through Facebook messages, businesses can rest assured that complaints get ticketed, assigned and answered through Freshdesk, whether it came through messages or the wall.
Sharing sensitive information “off the air”: A lot of times, businesses could need some sensitive information from the customer, like account details, email IDs or even their mother’s maiden name (seriously). The kind of stuff you wouldn’t want floating around in public. Now customers get to move the conversation off the air, by messaging the brand. And support teams using Freshdesk get all the details they need, without compromising their customer’s identity.
Finally, the whole loop in one place: If a customer has been frustrated enough to complain on Facebook, telling him/her to shoot a support email is not going to make him/her very happy. Support teams now get to run the whole conversation loop, shifting between “world-view mode” on their walls, and “incognito mode” on their messages.
Lesser timeline spam: Users look forward getting information about a brand that is relevant to them, when they like a page on Facebook. A timeline filled with conversations between the company and individual user has no consequence to anyone else. Now that individual conversations with a customer is moved to the message box, brands can show off a timeline with information pertinent to the whole community.
Converting Facebook messages into Helpdesk tickets
So there. You can check out how you can start supporting your customers through Facebook, using Freshdesk here. Or just go ahead and give your social help desk a spin with the free 30 day Trial.
Sairam
Big Banks aren’t ‘getting’ Twitter Customer Support
January 16th, 2012 A new report from Javelin has come to the conclusion that Twitter is proving to be quite an annoying customer service tool for big banks. The study says that customers love the platform and are more at home on Social Media than anywhere else, but banks are struggling with it.
Examining nearly 5500 tweets sent by banks in reply to customers who’d contacted them on Twitter, Javelin analyzed how many of the issues were resolved then & there, and how many had been diverted to a traditional channel, like email or a call center. This is seemingly a good way to analyze customer-business interaction on the social domain.
The research found that none of the big banks did an exceptionally good job of resolving complaints on Twitter. Citigroup was the best of the lot, resolving 36 percent of its Twitter based complaints; Wells Fargo, 11 percent; and Bank of America, 3 percent. Sure, the complaints could have been noted here and resolved elsewhere, but only the ones that were addressed on the platform the customers desired i.e, Twitter itself, fit the bill.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo actually answered with scripted replies that did not appease customers much, sending the signal that Twitter was only a workaround to get to the other communication channels.
The report goes on to say that when possible, the banks should answer questions directly on Twitter. But customers must also be educated about the security issues online, so they will need to switch to a private, direct message, or perhaps to another mode of communication, like a customer support representative, if account information or other such sensitive data is needed.
The study and the results reaffirm Freshdesk’s siding with social support. Banks should already be making efforts to avoid forcing the customer to explain the problem all over again. Twitter should be a tool to save the customer’s time, to aid his convenience, and not as yet another step to conventional customer service.
At such a point in the support landscape, businesses should choose a helpdesk that has all the features of a normal web based ticketing system, easy to use and feature rich, but which should also have social support as well. There are social customer service tools available for this, and organizations should choose the helpdesk that gives them the perfect blend of all these requisites.
With multiple platforms coming along, including Facebook and Google+, this phenomenon will definitely be on the rise. Brands will have increasing engagement on social platforms and more and more organizations will be found wanting when customers reach out to them.
We’ve talked about this same point extensively earlier on our blog, and made the case for solving the customer issue on the platform where he contacts the business. For further reading on Twitter strategies, here’s ‘8 tips on how to use Twitter for Business’.
You can get the complete report here.
Image courtesy beyondthecurtain.wordpress.com