Customer Services on Facebook: An Investigation into the UK Banking Sector

Abstract

This research aims to present insights into customer services on social media. There is rich literature on traditional customer services, which approach customer services different perspectives including (a) interactions with service providers (as human and remote interactions), (b) service environment and (c) interactions with other customers (for example through word-of-mouth communication). With the emergence of social media platforms, many businesses extended their service provision to include social media. According to industry sources, 80% of companies were planning to use social media for customer service by the end of 2012. Social media customer service is likely to reshape the provision of services between firms and their customers. However, there is very limited empirical research on the effectiveness of social media platforms as a customer services channel. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to address this gap by focusing on the UK banking sector and analysing their use of Facebook to provide customer services.