Social media drives customer service job growth

After looking at the trend data yesterday from Indeed.com, I ran across a post that also referenced customer service jobs. This is from Heidi Miller at Spoken Communications who talks about customer service trends. She referred to a Forbes article in which Andrea Ayers explains why “… customer service jobs will grow and grow”.

In her piece, Ms. Ayers cites statistics and data to support her conclusion. But her best argument is:

“The reason customer service jobs will continue to grow and expand is simple. It is an economic axiom that jobs are made where money is spent. The explosion of social media activity across the Internet has been making superior customer service more important than ever. Businesses have learned by now, or should have, that they’ve got to spend on customer service–and that when they do, it pays for itself.”

The power of social media, supported by the Internet, and driven by fundamental human needs is stronger than all the economic forces put together. The rules have changed and customers understand it. They now have more ability than ever before to make their opinions known – both before and after their customer experiences.

So smart companies will take note and conduct themselves accordingly. They’ll invest more in connecting with their customers and making sure they develop a wondrous ability to make them happy.

And I intend to watch this. To this end, I will be posting monthly statistics on the number of customer service jobs available.  Mind you I don’t claim a scientific validity to what I’ll present. But it will still be useful to see what the numbers are and to speculate on what they mean.

Customer Service Jobs: March 1, 2010

These are actual job listings in the Indeed.com database. I used this data source because it’s a job search engine so it includes many job sites across the Internet. And its data is easy to get.

The total is: 572,909

It includes all job listings in Indeed.com with these keywords:

customer service    480,098
customer care    13,957
guest service    12,994
call center    35,683
customer support    30,177

(The numbers indicated are the actual listings for each keyword set.)

To make things a little more interesting I decided to add another metric.  It’s important to look at the number of jobs that employers are adding for people to do the work of customer service. But it’s just as important to see how employers are investing in their management of customer service and support. So I will also track management and supervisory jobs in this space.

Customer Service Management Jobs: March 1, 2010

The total is: 7,276

It includes all job listings in Indeed.com with these keywords:

customer service manager    4,946
customer service supervisor    871
call center manager        488
call center supervisor        353
customer care manager        202
customer care supervisor    103
customer support manager    151
customer support supervisor    34
guest service manager        94
guest service supervisor    34

(The numbers indicated are the actual listings for each keyword set.)

I will update these every month, as of the first of each month. The data comes straight from Indeed.com (thank you Indeed.com!)

What do you think? Is social media driving customer service job growth beyond what we’d normally see? What are you experiencing in your industry that supports or contradicts this?

Other articles you might like:

• Top 10 Social Media Brand Segments
• Customer service jobs on the rise
• How to make customer service a priority
• Are You Listening To Your Customer
• Customer Service in a Challenging Economy