Australian companies not showing a talent for social media

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 25 August 2011 16:07

Business IT - Technology

If you're looking for customer service, it looks like the old avenues may still be the best, at least when dealing with Australian organisations.

"We don't do social media channels... very well in this country," Fifth Quadrant director Catriona Wallace told the Genesys G-Force 2011 conference in Melbourne today.

Dr Wallace described her own experience with using less conventional channels for pre-sales service. She started with an online chat session with a particular store. The process took 20 minutes, but failed to yield an answer to her question.

Contacting a store via Facebook provided "moderately helpful" suggestions, but took three days. An appeal for information via Twitter yielded no response at all.

According to Fifth Quadrant's survey, while almost half of Australian contact centres are set up for multichannel communication, only 16% have implemented social media capabilities.

The percentage of Australian contact centres with social media capability is expected to double over the next year, but is it really important? That depends on who your customers are. Dr Wallace said only 18% of Australians said they would be happy to use social media for service contacts with companies, but that almost doubled to 33% for Generation Y.

Should companies tweet back? See page 2.