You can add customer service to the growing litany of shopping experiences affected by social media in general, Facebook in particular. Customers headed online to shop are bringing with them high expectations about the kind of customer service they’ll get once there, especially on social networks. In a Q4 2011 survey of worldwide online consumers, Oracle found that online users valued having a number of pathways to customer service support, including through social media, click-to-call services and instant messaging.
Given Facebook’s dominance of the social media landscape, it should surprise no one that 46% of those polled anticipated that companies would provide customer support through the social network. Expectations for Twitter were significantly lower; only 17% of respondents thought brands would provide support and information via Twitter accounts.