he New Customer Service in the Age of Social Media

The purpose of this study is to investigate how has customer service changed in the current age of social media. Have customer service practices, especially dealing with complaints, changed due to social media? This research will be approached from two different perspectives; the Dutch retail companies that are active on social media platforms and the online customers and/or the social media fans. Four Dutch companies and nine online customers/fans served as subjects for this research. There is a lot of past research about social media customer relationships, online interaction between customers and companies, and online business opportunities. However, due to the evolutionary character of social media platforms, companies constantly need to develop new customer relationship strategies and possibilities that improve interaction and customer satisfaction. Modern technology is changing consumer complaints from a private matter to a public phenomenon (Ward & Ostrom, 2006). This phenomenon is definitely frightening some companies (Gregory, 2009).Different aspects are contributing to the changing character of customer complaining. This study focuses on the business opportunities that Facebook offers to companies, the changing role of Facebook fans, the role of customers and the importance of their needs and expectations, the social customer relationship management complaint-management process, customer complaints on social media, critical fans, the retail industry and the electronic word-of-mouth part (eWOM). Data for this research was collected through semi- standardized interviews. For this research, the selection of unit analysis is purposively selected. The findings support some previous studies, but they also highlight the importance of companies’ Facebook pages and the role customer services have on these pages. This research introduces a new finding that existing literature doesn’t cover. Dutch retail companies are embracing “like” and “share to win”- contests. The three interviewed companies are using these contests as engaging tool for their customers. Also, the majority of the interviewed companies’ Facebook fans enjoy the “like and share to win”- contest. The other interesting finding is that the majority of respondents chooses to visit the Facebook page of a company instead of the official website of the company. This demonstrates the importance of the presence of Facebook for these companies. The social media environment is constantly changing and adapting to these new developments. For many companies, Facebook is not the official tool to solve customer complaints. Nevertheless, this study shows that customer service is definitely on the way of becoming an official part of companies’ Facebook pages.