eBook

BEST PRACTICES FOR

SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

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ADOPTION OF SOCIAL CUSTOMER CARE JUMPS Which Department “Owns” Social Media Engagement?

The debate over which internal department “owns” social media continues with Marketing and Customer Care the clear leaders. While marketing took ownership of social media early on to protect the brand,

it’s becoming clear that customers want to engage with companies for service issues over social media. To ensure a great customer experience, collaborative communication across the organisation is required. McKinsey & Company even suggest an alternative is to locate social customer care in the operations function, like other customer-service channels. There, they can easily scale to meet the demand of the growing number of social media interactions that in most cases receive less than 5% responses to service requests.

Source: 2013 Customer Experience Management Benchmark: Execs in the Know

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2012 VS. 2013

42%Marketing

36%Customer

Care

7%Public

Relations

15%Other

59%Of respondents have clearly defined areas of engagementfor each department or content type

Divergence Customer Care gained the most ground in the ownership of social customer engagement, shifting from 10% to 36%. This trend is expected to continue, with more and more companies adopting a centralised approach to social media engagement.

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SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNEL IS OFTEN BLENDED

We have found that the larger the contact centre, the larger the percentage

of social interactions managed within the organisation. As size of contact centre increased so to was the likelihood of blending social media with other channels.

Source: Contact Centre Decision Makers Guide 2014

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SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLING, BY CONTACT CENTRE SIZE

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

120%

Small Medium Large Average

As part of the multichannel team that also handles telephony

As part of a dedicated multichannel team (i.e. email web chat social media, but no telephony)

We have a dedicated social media team in our contact centre

Handled by a team based outside our contact centre

Handled by a third party/outsourced team

17% 16% 26% 19%

11%

9%

53%

11%

7%

16%

52%

17%

10%

28%

28%

8%

9%

17%

45%

10%

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SOCIAL RESPONSE TIME EXPECTATIONS HIGHNot Responding in a Timely Fashion, is NOT an Option

We have seen over and over again the damage inflicted upon a brand by not responding in a timely manner if at all to their customers’ request for assistance. It is important to engage over social media and to manage the customers expectations.

Less than one hour Half a day (6 hours) One day (24 hours)

1-2 days Over 2 days

28% 22% 28%

6% 2% 14%

11%

I wouldn’t expect a response

Immediate

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FOUR CRITICAL STEPS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATIONThe Customer Engagement Challenge

To be truly effective, organisations must create an integrated approach to social media that includes customer service and

that has fundamentally powerful business benefits.

Through true integration, companies do not only gain the ability to listen to consumer sentiment about their brands, but they can prioritise these sentiments to determine the appropriate actions, engage with consumers as never before possible, and integrate

the resulting interactions across marketing, customer service and various other customer touchpoints to deliver a truly satisfying customer experience.

To realise this opportunity, a sequential set of 4 development phases is required, comprised of best practices that can help

companies build unbreakable customer loyalty and great customer experience.

Monitoring Analytics Omnichannel Engagement

Social Enable Enterprise

1 2 3 4

Monitor what matters: To be successful listeners, a brand must gain visibility into content communities and strategise ways to capture consumer sentiment about products, the services provided and the level of emotional engagement that exists with the brand.

Capture customer profiles: Capturing customers’ social media handles/profile information (their Facebook or Twitter profile names, for instance), so specific comments, questions, and concerns can be tied directly to actual customers or prospects – thus enabling a proactive and personalised

response, if warranted, to be much more productive.

1. MONITORINGGo Beyond Social Monitoring to Understand and Influence Consumer Sentiment

Today, there are various approaches being used to monitor social media. Some brands employ interns to conduct Google searches to determine if what’s being said about the brand is worthy of escalation to management. Some brands use sophisticated monitoring services that track comments, trends and geographies. Others, deploy entire social media “command centres” to

track tens of thousands of daily social media posts spanning hundreds of thousands of sites around the globe.

But questions arise: Who is doing the listening, and are they truly qualified to assess the significance of what they hear? Who are they listening to? What are they listening for? And how will that information be analysed and put to use? The goal should be much more than just the monitoring and visualisation of trends across the social sphere. This is not just about information; it’s

about knowledge and decision support. Some approaches to consider:

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Enhance the quality of

engagement by gaining insight into missed actionable opportunities

Understand user intention

Identify trends around issues, problems, questions,

value gain and team performance

Easily filter and prioritise data

“Quickly cut through the noise to avoid the social blind spot”

2. ANALYTICSHow do You Filter Out the Noise to Find the Messages that Matter?

Managing customer interactions over social media carries unique challenges for companies, particularly as the volume and breadth of social interactions continues to grow daily. Frequently this leads to missed actionable messages and opportunities for customer engagement. Getting caught in the social blind spot can result in customer churn and decreased brand loyalty. Frustrated customers often will expose company responses or misinformation via social media, which can erode brand reputation, lower Net Promoter Scores and Increase Customer Effort.

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3. OMNICHANNEL ENGAGEMENTDriving Context Aware, Personalised Customer Engagement

True social media engagement is about connecting reactively and proactively with customers and prospects in the most appropriate manner. The ability of companies to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience across customer interactions is only as good as their data. Those that continue to rely on disconnected channels, keeping their data in operational silos, are failing to extract the inherent value of their knowledge about their customers. By failing to enable a unified view of the customer across channels and touchpoints, companies aren’t capitalising on the context they can bring to each interaction, and are instead providing the same set of generic interactions that inevitably lead to a poor customer experience. By effectively leveraging a customer’s context –purchase history, recent interactions, past service issues, unfinished processes, etc. – and combining this with effective business

rules, companies can deliver a more satisfying customer experience.

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Source: “Omnichannel Customer Care,” Aberdeen Group, October 2013

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Research by Aberdeen Group reveals that companies with well-coordinated omnichannel customer experience programmes outperform their peers with asynchronous customer engagement efforts in key performance areas

such as customer rentention, average profit margin per customer and customer lifetime value.

THE BUSINESS VALUE OF OMNICHANNEL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PROGRAMMES

-2%

0%

2%

4%

6%

8%

Companies with omnichannel Customer Experience Management programmes

6.5%

3.4%

6.1%

1.0%

3.4%

-0.7%

Customer retention Average profit margin per customer Per cent of

respondents, n=305

Customer lifetime value

All Others

Get multi-modal so infrastructures can easily enable customers to cross channels. Not everything can be resolved through social media, so a seamless transition to direct human assistance may be required via another channel. The customer should feel they are having a consistent experience with the brand through each mode of communication. And those responsible for interacting within each channel should be fully informed about the entire interaction throughout.

Get real time with a single dashboard view of content, information and trends originating from social media and other data sources that stakeholders can see, understand and use to ensure the right action is put into play by the right individuals adhering to the right business rules.

70% surveyed believe integrating social media is important.

- Altimeter Group

4. SOCIAL ENABLED ENTERPRISEIntegrate the Conversation Across the Enterprise

A growing number of companies are hiring dedicated customer service representatives specifically assigned to social media, but when one or more departments establish dedicated social media teams, how are the rest of the people in the enterprise able to capture and leverage the insights they gain? The critical factor in empowering the social enterprise is a technological infrastructure capable of automating the business process transformation by capturing and prioritising social media content and interactions as part of the customer record, escalating as needed and routing to the appropriate person with full visibility from start to resolution. Some areas to consider are:

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48% or fewer of consumers are currently happy with thecustomer service they’ve experienced from using social media channels.

- eDigital Reserch

END-TO-END CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Website Mobile App Contact Centre Back Office Branch

Purchase Journey

Onboarding Journey

Account Change Journey

Problem Resolution Journey

Renewal and Repurchase Journey

“

“It costs 7X more to replace a customer than to keep one”

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SUMMARYIntegration of Social Media and Customer Service is No Longer Optional

Failure to do so results in marketing or other departments trying to address issues that are outside their area of expertise. Or, it results in duplicative efforts from both marketing and customer service to resolve issues without one knowing what the other is doing. For the customer journey, the disconnected response is likely to create an unsatisfactory resolution that can have a disastrous effect on a brand’s reputation as word spreads online. Most important of all, failure to harness the power of social media /customer service integration means severely limiting the effectiveness of any social media operation to bring true value to your brand and its customers. Beyond just the customer’s perspective, whether it’s reduced waste, less legal liability or more personalised customer care, this integration can make a tremendous difference to your bottom line. According to McKinsey & Company, on average, handling an inbound call typically costs a company $6 - $8; an interaction using socil media, less than $1.

In a competitive marketplace, companies that understand and capitalise on the power of social media integration with customer service

operations will take control of their industries. Before long, this integration won’t just be the stuff of competitive advantage, it will be the cost of entry. Smart brands will start bolstering their position – and banking the rewards – now.

TAKE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Industry leaders have achieved amazing results with the Genesys Social Media Solution for Customer Service such as:

An integrated approach to social media turns engagement opportunities into real business benefits. Genesys is helping enable the social enterprise by establishing social media as a customer service touchpoint, ensuring that companies deliver a truly satisfying customer experience that drives loyalty.

Increase in Agent Capacity Reduction in Agent Labour Costs

Reduction in Handle Time

Increase in Agent Productivity

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50%70% 10% 12%

Website: www.genesys.com/uk Contact Us: +44 (0) 1276 457000

Genesys, the world’s #1 Customer Experience Platform, empowers companies to create exceptional omnichannel experiences, journeys and relationships. For over 25 years, we have put the customer at the centre of all we do, and we passionately believe that great customer engagement drives great business outcomes. Genesys is trusted by over 4,700 customers in 120 countries, to orchestrate over 24 billion contact centre interactions per year in the cloud and on premises. For more information, www.genesys.com/uk.

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