Essay On Using Social Media To Build Customer Relationships

Focusing on building relationships with customers is one of the ideal ways that marketers can make good their marketing efforts. Jayson DeMers, in his article “7 Reasons You need to Be Using Social Media as Your Customer Service Portal” in Forbes magazine, offers hefty insight on how effective marketing can be used to build sound customer relationships. In this discussion, the summary of the article will be presented, the research question being addressed by DeMers, the source of data as well as the key findings.
DeMers’ article analyzes the various marketing dimensions through which social media marketing can be utilized to facilitate effective customer relation building. The article asserts that often, business owners and marketers regard social media as a platform to draw in new customers. However, they fail to recognize the opportunities that social media marketing presents in regard to building customer relationships. In the course of building customer relationships through inducing customer service representatives, organizations overlook the challenges that customers face, including finding and calling phone numbers, sending emails, seeking out service representatives and even submitting contract forms. Apparently, these challenges have to do with the delays encountered by customers before a concern or inquiry can be made as well as the feedback from the customer representatives. However, social media aids in evening off these setbacks of traditional customer relationship building techniques. Given this, the DeMers endorses the utilization of social media marketing as a tool to resolve issues and answer customer questions and concerns since it helps in creating significantly more “personal relationships with customers” over and above enhancing the “visibility of the brand of an organization in the process” (DeMers, 2014, p. 2). In essence, the question that DeMers’ article seeks to answer is: What are the potential advantages of using social media as an effective marketing platform in a bid to create sound customer relationships?
In the article, DeMers utilizes primary data in making his argument. More specifically, his sentiments on the idea of using social media to build customer relationships are grounded on his personal observations. In some cases, DeMers presents his argument in the eyes of his experience.
The article delivers the key findings of DeMers’ following his personal observations and experiences. The article demonstrates that the communication through social media is immediate as compared to other marketing platforms. Customers want prompt feedback on their concerns and questions rather than having to wait for long hours for their emails to be read and responded to or even worse, having to hold on for a while before their call can be picked up by the customer care representatives. With social media, it takes a matter of moments before the customer care representatives are notified so as to take appropriate action. The article also found that since customers prefer dealing with individuals and corporations, social media is ideal because, unlike corporations that give automatically generated emails, individual customer care representatives respond to social media notifications after pondering over the response in a careful manner. Also, it was asserted that social media presents a public platform for customers to present their concerns and grievances, and thus they feel in control because of the urgency that is created for the company to respond to such issues. What is more is that social media facilitates the process of follow-up since if a concern or question is answered immediately, the customer care representative can easily inquire from the customer if the response was helpful or not. The article also found out that social media eliminates the funnel in the sense that customers get a response through the same platform they presented their concern rather than being prompted to follow a mechanical series of hoops. To boot, social media enhances the mentioning of the brand to several customers through the posting of concerns and questions and effective response to this grievance means that customers will talk about their experience on the same platform, social media. Without a doubt, social media presents an effective tool for building customer relationships, an essential factor for the success of any given organization.

Reference

DeMers, J. (2014). 7 Reasons You Need to Be Using Social Media As Your
Customer Service Portal. Forbes. Retrieved from <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/12/7-reasons-you-need-to-be-using-social-media-as-your-customer-service-portal/2/>