Peer-to-peer support in your social customer service strategy

"What happens when we treat customers as part of the company?"

Blunt and Hill-Wilson begin Chapter 5 of Delivering Effective Social Customer Service with this question, and after reading the chapter, I have a better idea of what positive social customer service can do for a company. The growth of online communities has helped bring the customer and the company much closer in the past decade. Online communities nurture company relationships, share knowledge, generate discussions and often provide peer-to-peer customer support. Online communities also provide a great platform for what Blunt and Hill-Wilson call the "super user," or in other words, the 1% of online users who participate often and generate the majority of the content in online communities.

In PR, we know it's all about the customer. For any organization, it's about making the customer happy in order to nurture the mutually beneficial relationship. When the mutually beneficial relationship is nurtured - for example, maybe when the customer is extremely satisfied with the social customer service they've received from an organization personally - that's when the customer becomes a "super user" for the organization. A super user is an advocate for both the organization and the peer-to-peer social customer service model, and they will support your organization in turn by spending hours in your online community providing peer-to-peer social customer service.

The peer-to-peer social customer service model is effective, because social media has given the customers a voice, and customers have begun trusting other customers more so than they trust organizations. "Peer-to-peer support is no longer just a destination which requires signposting. As previously mentioned, customers no longer need to find your community. It can come to where they are" (p. 89).

Chapter 5 of Delivering Effective Social Customer Service came full circle in my opinion. A big part of social customer service involves treating customers as part of the company. When organizations are able to do this, those customers feel empowered to act as super users in the organization's online community. They share knowledge, advice and customer service to other customers. The assistance from super users is often more beneficial to organizations than their own customer service efforts, because peer-to-peer support is often viewed as more credible than peer-to-organization support. Treating customers as part of the company through effective social customer service grows the members in your online peer-to-peer support community, and this online community will help nurture mutually beneficial relationships.