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More Than Half of Australian Businesses Will Adopt Social Media to Boost Customer Service in 2011

Announcement posted by RightNow Technologies 30 Nov 2010

Sydney, 30 November 2010 — More than half of all Australian businesses (54 per cent) will adopt social media as a customer service channel for the first time in 2011 with 71 per cent investigating the use of Facebook, and 53 per cent reviewing Twitter as potential vehicles for propelling positive customer experiences. A further 42 per cent also plan to launch a company branded customer community as a new way of driving customer engagement.
 
That’s according to a survey conducted among IT and customer service professionals at the RightNow Asia Pacific Summit staged earlier this month in Melbourne.  
 
The survey found that 82 per cent of organisations currently provide customers with phone support, 88 per cent provide email support and 77 per cent provide web support.  Thirty-five per cent of organisations also provide web chat facilities.   
 
The move to adopt social media in 2011 coincides with a transition to mobile self-service as smart phones* become increasingly pervasive.  Sixty per cent of organisations plan to increase their mobile self-service investment in the year ahead.  While three-quarters of all business (77 per cent) are reviewing the addition of mobile-self-service to their existing customer service organisation and support channels in the year ahead. Driving the extension of self-service capabilities to handheld devices is the need to improve an individual customer’s experience, 66 per cent stated this to be the case.
 
“The survey’s results are a real wake-up call for organisations of all sizes that don’t respond to new possibilities for enhancing their brand image and striving for market leadership.  Providing a mobile experience, having a compelling Facebook presence, responding to your customer’s tweets, creating online communities and remaining at the forefront of customer service innovation will be the hallmarks for the organisations that succeed in satisfying the needs of individual customers in 2011 and beyond,” says Brett Waters, Vice President Asia Pacific- South, RightNow Technologies.
 
* According to Frost & Sullivan, 62 percent of all devices sold will be smartphones by 2015, up from two percent in 2009.
 
About RightNow
RightNow is helping rid the world of bad experiences one consumer interaction at a time, eight million times a day. RightNow CX, the customer experience suite, helps organisations deliver exceptional customer experiences across the web, social networks and contact centres, all delivered via the cloud. With more than ten billion customer interactions delivered, RightNow is the customer experience fabric for nearly 2,000 organisations around the globe. To learn more about RightNow, go to www.rightnow.com
 
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