The other day econsultancy released the findings of a SITEL-commissioned  (UK) study showing that 15% of 16-24 year olds prefer to use social media for customer services above any other channel.   Overall, across all age groups, 6% prefer to use social media, and 4% have actually complained on Twitter.

Not that impressive, right?

Actually that headline stat from the study  needs to be read in terms of both the wider context, and in tandem with other findings from the survey.  These show that the Internet as a whole is now the preferred route to finding solutions to problems with products, services or brands.

1/3 of consumers have used forums to find solutions

In particular:

• 57% of consumers across all age groups will search for a solution to a problem online first
• 33% have used forum or chat-based websites to find answers – in the UK, moneysavingexpert is one that tends to come up fairly frequently
• 19% use a ‘question based’ site like Quora or Yahoo! Answers, a number I found surprisingly high

So what should the conclusions be?  I would highlight a number of things:

1 – Only 4% may have complained on Twitter, but remember that is across all industry sectors.   If you take certain sectors such as financial services, electronics and travel the % is almost much, much higher.

Indeed, in June Jaan Albrecht of Star Alliance said that 30% of customer feedback received by the 27 member airlines comes via social media

2 – The stats about forums and question sites does show that any customer response programme online needs to embrace a lot more than Twitter and Facebook.  Monitoring needs to encompass all online touch-points where consumers can feed back, interact and ask questions

3 – The % of those that complain via social media is bound to increase.   In training sessions I do, I often talk of an (un) virtuous cycle – as consumers watch their peers circumventing the call centre or (worse) the written complaints procedure on Twitter, they will do the same.

At least anecdotally, one travel brand I trained earlier in the year told me that the tone of comments they had received on Twitter were much more insistent than previously – as far as consumer expectations are concerned, the bar is now higher

Image – Life is Art 

Related articles

• 15% of those aged 16-24 turn to social media first for customer service (econsultancy.com)
• Social media replacing customer service channels at banks: report (zdnet.com)
• 15% Of Young People Use Social Media For Customer Service (thebluedoor.com)

Previous results showed that TV is still far in front with the Internet a  distant second and newspapers nowhere to be seen.   But for 18-25 year olds things were somewhat different.   Mobile phones and not PCs+Internet were in second place.   TV was in front, but not by much.

The latest results have changed and an important milestone has been crossed:

TV remains the most-missed media for UK adults as a whole, although this has decreased from 50% in 2009 to 44% in 2010.   But for the first time, adults aged 16-24 mention using a mobile phone (28%) and using the internet (26%) ahead of watching television (23%).     Result – TV only campaigns are increasingly leaving consumers behind, and if you haven’t got a mobile element you are missing a lot of young adults completely.

Trust in social media increases
Another key stat: Trust in information relayed via social media and online media as a whole has increased.

34% trust what they read in newspapers, while 59% trust what they read on news websites.  Related to that, as another study showed, online articles command more attention than their print equivalents.

However at the same time, more consumers now trust rather than distrust what they see on social networks – 36% vs 33%.   That trust is most likely to be highest among women, 16-35 year olds and ‘AB’ higher earners.

Related articles

• Youths inseparably hooked to mobile phones (news.bioscholar.com)
• Young people ‘would rather live without TV than mobiles or net’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Global Mobile Broadband Market To Be Worth US$ 233 Billion By 2015 But ARPU Will Decline (telecomjunction.wordpress.com)

Americans today consume 70 minutes worth of news a day – that’s 22.8% more than 2000.   The 57 minutes of news received via the traditional media of TV, radio and newspapers remain the same, yet on top of that there are now 13 minutes spent getting news online.     The online news total of 13 minutes is also now ahead of the print news total of 10 minutes.

That latter stat provides a good counter weight to the one released by the Columbia Journalism Review last year claiming that 88% of newspaper reading time is in print.   Perhaps both those surveys together point to the way we consume news being different, with online news being increasingly a commodity.   So we read the newspaper in print, but we read the article online.

Interesting as well that Pew also found that news searches were up, showing that we are much more single minded in finding something, getting what we want (with the publication being often secondary), and moving onto another site.

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• Pew Research: More People Got Their News Online Yesterday Than From A Print Newspaper (techcrunch.com)
• Americans spending more time with news – Pew survey (newsinfo.inquirer.net)

Conducted among US Internet consumers, the study showed that 27% of subscribers to an email newsletter were more likely to purchase from a brand while 37% of Twittewr users were.

Meanwhile less than one in five Facebook brand fans (17%) said they were more likely to buy – a surprise considering that 49% disagreed with that statement (which is obviously not the same as saying that they were less likely to make a purchase).

Exact Target has produced a handy chart showing that while Twitter has the lowest reach, it provides the greatest opportunities for customer acquisition.   However, it’s email subscribers who are the most interested in getting discounts, promotions or freebies.

Finally, it’s worth looking at who conducted the survey.

Exact Target is an email marketing system, and Co Tweet is a Twitter management tool…no Facebook app developers involved in the study then.   I’m not suggesting the data is wrong.

A lot of it is definitely interesting, and personally I am a big Twitter fan, but you do wonder if some of the questions were skewed to produce a certain result.

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• Study Finds Customers Value Email, Facebook and Twitter as Collaborators, not Competitors (eon.businesswire.com)
• Study Finds Twitter Users Three Times More Likely to Impact Brands Online (eon.businesswire.com)
• Smartphones, other mobile devices boost social networks (macworld.com)
• Despite Fanfare, Only 3% of General Public Use Twitter for News (socialtimes.com)

Academics Nicole Votolato Montgomery (College of William and Mary) and H. Rao Unnava (Ohio State University) gave test subjects two holiday scenarios.   One started well but ended badly, and the other started badly but ended well.

They were then asked which one they’d most likely pay money for.   You’d imagine most people would say the holiday that ended well, and consumers who were asked about the experience immediately afterwards agreed.

However after a period of time consumers chose the scenario that started well as they couldn’t remember the final events as well.

“Consumers exhibit a preference for experiences that improve over time versus worsen over time when evaluations are assessed immediately, and they prefer the reverse when evaluations are assessed following a delay,” write the authors.

“Our findings suggest that marketers may engineer experiences to maximize customer enjoyment by improving the most memorable events. For long-term customer enjoyment, marketers should attempt to make consumers’ initial experiences with a service or product very positive.”

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