Increased customer satisfaction and meeting customer expectations lead the reasons that companies are moving to new methods of interacting with customers. Surprisingly, reduced cost and increased revenue don’t rank high, even if these are often leading outcomes.

The reasons behind the move of all companies, regardless of size, to social customer service are still based on the maxim "the customer is always right.

Roughly 9 in 10 respondents to our survey believe that providing customer service over social channels is a good thing for their customers and for their organization.

Despite the difficulties being experienced, Lieberman has suggested that there is no need to panic. In fact, he believes that businesses have been through an almost identical scenario before when email came to the fore, and organizations should take heart from the fact that they survived and thrived with that new channel.

I do believe that social media channels can be good for large-scale customer service issues such as explaining an outage, emphasizing a change in policy, or apologizing for a botched job...But please don’t use Twitter DM’s to solve an individual customer problem. …I think I deserve a more personal means of connecting.