The De�nitive Guideto Social Customer Service

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Social customer service is an entirely new challenge for companies; one that many couldn’t have envisaged only a few years ago. It is a real need today, but one which has crept up on us unexpectedly. The successful attempts of marketing teams to attract an audience and foster engagement have opened up a new route for customers to speak to companies about anything they want - including real problems and questions.

Delivering effective customer service through social networks provides a great opportunity to connect with customers, but presents new obstacles that customer service and marketing departments have never had to confront before.

The job of the social media manager trying to organise an entirely new customer engagement program is a tricky one. What are the practical steps you need to take to make it happen for your own organisation?

This guide will try to help you figure it out.

Introduction

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Where do I start?

You can pick this guide up wherever it suits you. If you’re just starting to get organised, hit it from the top, but if you’re looking to shape up your processes, dive straight into Level Two.

You’ll find several workbook elements, designed to help you shape your own program for your company. We hope this guide will be a well-loved resource, for you to keep by your side as you grow.

What’s in store?

Making the case for social customer serviceWhy does it all matter?

Level One: The BasicsHow to get going on your own – delivering the right kind of response for social media.

Level Two: Calling for BackupTools to help you extend a social customer service program throughout your company.

Level Three: Measuring and RefiningHow you can understand and improve your social customer service program and keep track as you scale it.

Afterthought: The Future of Social Customer ServiceWhere you can take your social customer serviceprogram next.

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Why does it matter?

Making the Case for Social Customer Service01

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The Challenge of Social Engagement

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In most companies, marketing departments have initiated social media programs. The public nature of the medium puts pressure on getting the message right, in what is first and foremost an opportunity for promotion. Any communication (or miscommunication) on social media represents your brand in its entirety. This can make social customer service difficult to get started with, as there’s little room for experimentation with the looming threat of mistakes going viral.

Today, consumers are bringing a whole range of enquiries to social media that require specific knowledge. This could be the details of a particular deal, product or just the processes to deal with a complaint effectively. Marketing departments might have tone of voice nailed, but just don’t hold the information needed to pass on to customers when it comes to real customer service issues. Conversely, contact centres and customer service teams hold the knowledge customers are crying out for, but they just aren’t placed to respond to them.

“Are service processes well defined for social channels?”

“Do you think providing customer service over social channels is a good thing for your organisation?”

Balancing group engagement with individual requests on social networks is a unique challenge. An effective social engagement program requires input from several areas of the company

01Tuning the message 02 Delivering the knowledge

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Sounds tough, why bother?

Your customers are asking for customer service on Facebook and Twitter.

01It’s already happening

Source: Facebook, Conversocial, Oracle, Clickfox.

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A social media crisis is a huge fear for marketers. Altimeter reviewed a decade of social PR storms and found that the biggest culprit was a poor experience shared online. Service received is the one issue that will touch every customer you have.

According to ClickFox, only 3.5 % of customers remain unaffected by other customers’ comments on your page.

Our own research has found that an astronomical 88% of consumers would be less likely to buy from companies ignoring complaints and questions on social media. With social networks, your community is strongly united, and cares about much more than direct individual experiences. Those who fail to address customers’ problems will suffer financially.

Causes of Social Media Crises (2001-2011) More than one cause

may apply

02Ignoring it is bad for business

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Customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and meeting customer expectations are perceived as the strongest benefits to be gained from social engagement, and social customer service is understood to be integral to achievement.

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“Do you think providing customer service over social channels is a good thing for your customers? ”

UK cinema chain, ODEON, found that starting a serious in-house social customer service program reduced negative sentiment by 60%. ODEON’s social channels have become reliable routes for cinema-goers to reach out, which has greatly increased the number of queries being submitted in favour of damaging complaints.

“What were the primary/secondary benefits experienced when using social channels? ”

03Doing it right brings real benefits

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“If you are unable to get an enquiry answered or issue resolved in a timely manner via social media, what is your next point of contact with a company?”

People often turn to Facebook and Twitter once they have exhausted other channels, and see social media as an opportunity to finally be heard – taking the issue public. By this point, customers are often frustrated to the point of turning to a competitor.

CASE STUDY: Leading UK Telecoms company, B.T, has achieved significant results from effective social customer service. Their surveys found that over 50% of customers find it easy to get help using social media, with the majority also now preferring these platforms to traditional channels. This is generating significant savings, with 54,000 calls being deflected via social media every month, and allowing for effective crisis communication, with over 300,000 customers reached via Twitter during the London riots. Most significantly, because of the service they’ve had over social media, 90% of customers plan on staying as customers, and 50% say they would recommend BT to friends.

04Doing social customer service properly has an impact on your bottom line

But it’s not too late! In fact it’s the very time to turn them around. Customer retention is the mainstay of social media value. Marketing often focuses on new customer acquisition, but comprehensive social engagement can increase the value of existing customers, and even transform them into brand advocates.

Trying to push customers away from social customer service isn’t only frustrating; it’s expensive. Phone support costs an average of $15 for every call. It’s worth investing the time to get social customer service done properly, through the channels requested. It’s what your customers expect, and they’ll thank you for achieving it.

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How to get going on your own – delivering the right kind of response for social media

Level One: The Basics02

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Facebook and Twitter 101There are plenty of references across the web to social media best practice, but it’s important to keep in mind the context of the platform you are working with. We’re focusing on Facebook and Twitter in this guide, as the most widely used social networks by consumers.Facebook and Twitter present slightly different customer service challenges and requirements.

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Twitter: The Quick Spread

Twitter is also known as a microblog, and is all about distribution. The scope for retweeting means that a negative message can be spread to an unanticipated audience.Your own broadcasting channel remains unaffected by your customer service requests, but your presence on Twitter is more heavily characterised by what the masses are saying.

Facebook: The Long Burn

Facebook is less set up for the wide distribution of commentary. But your outward broadcasting channel can be more easily tainted by complaints and unanswered questions. Your entire fan base can see complaints when they see your updates or visit your page, but anyone who isn’t already engaged with you is less likely to discover negative issues.

Facebook: One Voice

When customers visit you on Facebook to complain or ask a question, you should reply as the page. Some companies have established fake profiles (‘Jenny at Conversocial’) for the company to respond from. This may seem like a nice way to offer support, but these fake accounts are against Facebook terms of service and may be deactivated. Anyone can setup one of these fake accounts and it’s much harder to determine whether outreach is legitimate.

Twitter: Connected Voices

Many companies establish a different Twitter account to respond to customer service issues than is used for marketing updates, to try and channel customers’ messages. For those with huge volumes of incoming tweets, it’s often necessary, with a limit of 1,000 tweets per day for any account. However, setting up @companyhelp won’t stop customers from complaining to @company, and you’ll need to be prepared to pick up issues wherever they’re directed.

Remember: Customers can take a screen shot or copy and paste text to share anything in minutes, no matter what the platform. Online, it’s much easier for news to spread than any other medium.

Your Corporate Response

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02We’ve pulled together this table to demonstrate some things to be aware of when customers reach out to you in different ways in Facebook and Twitter.

Message

Message

What you should know...

What you should know...

@mention

Post

Tweet containing an @mention

Tweet with your company name/product or service

Comment

Retweet

Private message

Direct Message

Your customer is speaking directly to you. This appears on their profile rather than being published to their followers, and so is specifically targeted at you.

Customers often come to a fan page to post customer service issues; it’s one of the few times they visit the actual page, as most engagement takes place via the news feed. On the new Facebook timeline, these can be viewed at the very top of the page under ‘Recent posts by others’. Both you and other customers can respond with comments under the post.

Your customer is writing a tweet about you to their followers’ news feeds, but they want you to see it.

Your customer has referenced you or your services in a tweet. Although they might simply not know or bother to look for your Twitter handle, reaching out to these tweets is more proactive than reactive service, and you’ll need monitor Twitter for specific searches.

When a customer adds a comment to one of your updates the rest of your fans can see it in their news feeds, without them having to visit your page. Often, this will be general chatter and interactions, but updates can also prompt customers to complain or ask questions, particularly for posts about products. These can get lost among other comments without the right tools. But the cost of missing them is high, because of their visibility and the chance of the issue snowballing as other customers add their comments.

When someone sees something they find interesting and retweets it, they are effectively hitting ‘share’ to their followers. This isn’t a new tweet (it’s even displayed with the original name and picture), but is the way in which one tweet gets a whole new audience.

Facebook recently released private messages for pages, which are pretty similar to Twitter’s Direct Message. Anyone can send you a direct message by visiting your Facebook timeline, making Facebook a more comprehensive service channel. These can be any length, and you can only respond to customers – you can’t initiate a private conversation.

Direct Messages are used to send private messages to other Twitter users, and you must be following someone to receive one. Unless you have a validated account, you will need to follow customers in order for them to share personal details with you, so make sure you do before asking for a DM.

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Take Real Customer Service to Social Media

What are your customersasking for?You can save yourself a great deal of time by looking at the most common requests you receive through social channels. Identifying recurring queries and getting all the facts down allows you to respond even quicker.

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Why?

On social media your customer service program is being watched, and that matters for business. What’s at stake is far bigger than the individual requests raised. If you resolve an issue offline, that customer might go away satisfied, but it doesn’t undo the social damage of their complaint. How do your other customers know that you’re so helpful?

The most important goal for a new social customer service program is the fast and public resolution of customers’ problems. Social customer service should deliver real assistance, not lip service to the idea of customer care.

Take a look at the past fortnight or month of your Facebook and Twitter messages.

• What issues came up again and again?

• Is there some part of company policy or a nugget of information you can obtain to help your customer?

• Can you give them specific steps to resolve their problem?

For general queries or complaints, you should be able to create an easily accessible resource of answers. It could be that asking a colleague a few simple questions could fast-track your efforts to offer real help to your customers on behalf of your company.

Fill in your findings into the worksheet on the next page. This FAQ list can form the basis of your customer service framework to be shared throughout your organisation when you come to scale up your response machine.

Exercise:

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02Social FAQ’s

Tip:

Creating this list of real questions that are asked on Facebook and Twitter is the best way to demonstrate your company’s need to take customer service seriously to others in your team. If you regularly need to turn to others for help, then it’s about time that you got your customer service team involved (See Level 2)

Question Answer

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Crafting a Response Fit for the Public

• Customer expectations of a more approachable version of your brand

• Core characteristics and principles grounded in your own brand guidelines

• Professionalism of a serious and dedicated service channel

A response to a question in social media becomes a part of your brand experience - customer service replies are no different to marketing updates. As for any public outlet for your brand voice, it’s important to think about what wording and colloquialisms are appropriate for your company in social media. If you have any tone of voice guidelines established for official company posts and tweets, you can take a huge amount of this into your approach to customer service responses.

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Social networks require a fundamentally different tone of voice to more traditional channels, such as email. Some natural restrictions, such as Twitter’s 140-character limit, can make certain things acceptable (such as shortening words to fit the character limit) that wouldn’t be acceptable elsewhere.

When you respond on Facebook or Twitter it comes from the brand, but this doesn’t mean it has to be cold and corporate. To make replies more personal, agents can sign their names (or initials in Twitter). This shows the person behind the response, and allows for a human connection to develop with those customers that engage with you regularly.

No matter where the lines are drawn for your brand’s social persona, showing empathy, and being responsive to the tone of each message is essential. If your customer is reaching out to you positively, you should mirror their enthusiasm. If they are angry or upset, a more sombre tone is required.

Accepting genuine faults and saying sorry is much better for damage control than denying issues or deleting comments, both of which are sure to make customers more angry and vocal - and put you at risk of issues escalating into full-blown crises. False or mistaken statements about your company should be corrected (only when you’re certain) but behaving defensively will only add fuel to the fire. Customers may use angry or aggressive language, but it shouldn’t be matched. You’ll be surprised how much a few sympathetic words can pacify an irate customer. Company statements should always be calm.

All social customer service responses have certain basic requirements:

KLM’s rules of engagement

• Embrace feedback, even when it’s negative (neutralise those who are expressing dissatisfaction, or even turn them into advocates)

• Respect privacy. Do not share personal information publicly.

• Show empathy and acknowledge your customer’s emotions. It will open the dialogue.

• Sometimes people just want to be heard - listening can be better than a solution.

03 Reactive Tone

04 Calm and Measured Reactions

You’ve identified your customers’ most pressing issues, and gathered some useful information to share with them, but delivering the perfect response is a fine art.

You need to carefully balance:

01Sociable Language

02Personalised Response

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Scaling Gracefully

The customer service burden grows when issues are neglected. One ignored customer equates to more than one problem to deal with. Fans and followers will repost their complaint and others will get involved. If you don’t step in and address an issue, your upset customer will find that others chime in to share similar experiences, and real momentum can pick up on a problem. The only way to stop the snowball rolling is to get involved.

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As the volume of questions and queries coming through social media mounts, you need to find ways to maintain your level of service and avoid a customer backlash.

The Risk: The snowball effect

Social media can never become a serious service channel if attention to customers’ issues is ad-hoc. Dissatisfied customers become even unhappier if they discover others getting preferential treatment, while their own queries go unanswered. Inconsistency is more critical on social networks than private customer service channels – every request is available for your entire customer base to see.

The Solution:

01Step 1: Consistency

Make sure every issue gets a response

Most companies aren’t purposefully ignoring people; often they have hardworking and attentive social media managers who are trying to respond to questions when they see them. But with high volumes of messages, it becomes impossible to know what you’ve seen. On Twitter, @mentions and DM’s come in a consistent date order, but in Facebook questions can be asked in a comment on an old post or photo.

At scale it becomes very difficult to keep track without software. The right software will ensure that everything is seen, and that multiple team members aren’t wasting time searching for new messages or duplicating their effort.

Establish a method that ensures no messages are being missed

Conversocial’s research has found that leading companies are ignoring around 60% of customer issues on Facebook.

Conversocial’s workflow operates the Inbox 0 concept. If you can see it, someone needs to deal with it. A shared team inbox, that presents every customer message chronologically, means that you can work through content as a team and ensure nothing is missed and no efforts are duplicated.

How Conversocial Helps:

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02Step 2: Quality

Consumers are turning to companies with genuine customer service issues, but are frequently pointed towards traditional customer service channels if they want real help. Regardless of the channel, when customers reach out first contact resolution makes for the best customer experience. Even if you can’t give a complete resolution straight away, make sure your response shows you are really listening, and they have succeeded in connecting with your company. If you need further information to help, ask for it, even if this is just to pass on to a colleague. An auto-responder, akin to ‘thank you, we have received your email’ won’t cut it.

Make a real connection

Have you passed on information which puts your customer in a better position than when they first reached out?

Top attributes for a good customer experience

Ask yourself:

Source: Convergys U.K. Customer Scorecarrd

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03Step 3: Speed

Match expectations for a faster response Aim for a speedy reply as a next step. The longer complaints are left unanswered, the more likely they are to be seen by more of your customers, and snowball. Social media moves much faster than other channels and consumers have high expectations of the companies they interact with:

• 81% of Twitter users expect a same-day response to questions and complaints posted at the newsfeed.

• 30% of Twitter users expect a response within 30 minutes and 22% expect a response within two hours.

• 29% of consumers on Facebook expect a response within two hours when they post a question at a company’s page and 22% expect a same-day response.

Once you’ve started replying to all of your real customer service requests, see how long it takes you. You can use this as a reference to post guidelines on your Twitter profile and Facebook timeline to let customers know when they can realistically expect a response. If you can influence your customers’ expectations, you’re far more likely to meet them!

Tip:

Although it will take refinement to get there, getting out responses as close to these expectations as possible will put you on the road to high customer satisfaction. If you’re struggling to get anywhere near these response times, it’s an indication that it’s time to get more help on board.

We pull in all of your social messages into your inbox in chronological order, and these can be filtered and processed in the way that suits you. Important customer service issues are prioritised to make sure you see them quickly so you can respond effectively. When it’s time to bring in back-up, Conversocial lets you collaborate with colleagues in an effective and controlled manner, so you know exactly who’s dealing with what.

How Conversocial Helps:

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Tools to help you extend a social customer service program throughout your company

Level Two: Calling for Backup03

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Building a solid team behind the scenes

When everyone in your company wants in on the social media action, that’s nothing to be sniffed at. Different departments have different things to offer your customers. But managing and balancing access to social media can be a logistical challenge.

There’s no fixed model for the perfect social media team, and each is constituted slightly differently. But generally, a representative of the frontline of customer contact and someone responsible for brand and marketing activities should bring their heads

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Who’s involved, what do they do, and how do they work together?

together. And in truly social companies, someone is really listening to customer comments on social networks and feeding this back into product design or service offering.

Place the customer at the centre of your social engagement strategy to make sure you’re meeting each of their needs when they speak out to your brand. When everyone works together, customers are made happier.

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Who should take these places in your organisation?Exercise: Who is involved in social media in your company – what are they currently responsible for?

Is anyone missing? Look back at the FAQ’s you compiled in Part One of this guide. For those queries you were unable to answer yourself or within your team, it’s important to identify who could.

• Do some queries require local in-store knowledge?

• Do some queries relate to aspects of your service that you outsource, for example delivery?

• Do some queries require knowledge from more than one department, for example stock availability?

If you were to give your customers complete service, what would it take? Who needs to be involved to make sure that customers get an answer to those questions?

Name Role Department Responsibilities

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Steps to sound social media organisation

It’s a good idea to formalise early stage communications on getting a social engagement process that works for your company. Creating a cross-functional team allows you to assess and coordinate the input from everyone involved.

In some businesses this team becomes a permanent body to represent the needs and interests of each department, but even if you don’t carry it forward, a diverse social media team is an important think tank. This might only involve a few meetings and documents to agree processes, but it will save you a huge amount of time. Everyone you’ve jotted down for your perfect social media team should be involved in these early activities.

Developing a coordinated social engagement strategy

Bring your heads togetherWhat should your social think tank organise?

You should aim to have clear answers to the following questions:

1. What are your goals for social media engagement?

2. Why do you have a presence?

3. What do you want to make sure you achieve?

4. What do you want to learn?

Some of these objectives will be common across the board, and some will be department specific, but they should all contribute to a consistent and quality experience of your company for customers.

A recent survey of business executives showed that perceived benefits of social customer service are wide-ranging, but the most prominent surround customer satisfaction. Delivering positive customer experiences should underpin all more specific targets; each team member should think about how they fit into delivering a positive and consistent experience.

Source: We Are Social: The State of Social Customer Service

01 Set objectives

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02Determine responsibilities

This will depend on your own goals for social engagement, but there are certain responsibilities you should establish early on:

These responsibilities should be available for all to access.

When you’ve established who’s taking care of different areas of your social engagement program, these can be formalised into bespoke roles and permissions, leaving no room for confusion. Quick and fluid team workflow enables staff across different departments to communicate easily and distribute work appropriately.

How Conversocial Helps:

03 Connect a Customer Service Representative to Facebook & Twitter

Getting even just one customer service representative directly connected to customers on social networks is the most important move towards serious social customer service.

Liaising between marketing and customer service is essential for getting that first agent up and running. Your first social customer service agent will forge a bridge between different departments. Remember that you are addressing a completely new area that your company isn’t likely set up to tackle. Your social media think-tank is the best way to make this happen.

This early social customer service ambassador needs to be fully integrated into your company’s customer service processes, with the same knowledge, capabilities and power to act as the rest of your customer service team. However, they should work closely between the social media team and customer service team, rather than being slotted neatly into one department or another.

Who takes care of messaging and tone of voice, and is responsible for making sure everyone adheres to guidelines?

Who publishes updates to Facebook and Twitter? Do you differentiate between marketing and service updates?

Who deals with incoming communication from fans? Should the customer service department take care of general engagement, or are certain conversations dealt with by a community manager?

Who will be tracking the performance of your social engagement? Are different teams interested in different areas?

Who will be collecting information available from social conversations and who do they need to update with any insights discovered?

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You want to avoid your agents passing on any issues they could answer themselves, so make sure you fully prepare them to take on all they are capable of.

Social customer service agents have specific skills, and you should form a dedicated social customer service team before you try to roll out social media engagement to your entire contact centre. Getting the right team in place from the start will allow you to have a much more autonomous social customer service operation.

To get the right recruits, whether hired internally or found afresh, a solid and successful customer service history is important. You should place especial emphasis on great written communication skills, as well as a thorough knowledge of the social platforms you will be working with.

Take what you’ve learnt from the earlier stages of this guide and from your company’s highest-level brand guidelines to formulate some basic rules and suggestions for new engagers. This doesn’t need to be fully formed at first; you’ll constantly learn what gets the best (and worst) reactions from your customers as you go. Being clear about where real boundaries lie will actually give your team more confidence to be personable.

When you’ve spent a lot of time managing your company’s social presence, it’s easy to forget that it’s a completely new world for those used to engaging with customers through traditional channels.

• For those who are completely new to social engagement, start with recommended phrases to use in responses, or signoffs that your advisors can add to Facebook messages. Once they feel confident with these prescribed replies, they can start to be a bit more creative and make their own tweaks.

E.g. “I’m sorry to hear that, [Name]” “I hope this helps!”

• If there are things you don’t want your agents to do or say, make that perfectly clear, specific and accessible. This way, there’s no need for hesitancy or uncertainty when crafting responses.

E.g.

Scaling up your team. It’s all under control Some basic tools and processes to help you keep social engagement running smoothly as your team grows.

Recruit a team with social skills

Create training documents with do’s and don’ts 01 02

Don’t show personal bias or be opinionated in your repsonses.

Don’t use emoticons or abbreviated text language.

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Create a template response for each of the FAQs assembled earlier in this guide. This will save your entire team a huge amount of time, increasing the number of messages that can be dealt with independently and saving time to devise answers for those queries that present any uncertainty. Furthermore, template responses are an opportunity to formalise some basic guidelines in examples. You can write policy for how to handle different issues publicly (i.e. always offer a refund for complaints around quality) into template responses. Replies will need to be tailored for each query, but gives every agent a great head start on each response they make.

You should prepare different templates for Facebook and Twitter, taking the character allowances into account.

Provide template responses to FAQs 03

Hiring Best Buy’s ‘community connectors’ must have a minimum of 6 months internal customer service experience before they can apply; and the core thing they look for is strong writing skills.

How Best Buy Does It

Training The agents receive 4 weeks consumer relations training on how to deal with questions and complaints publicly, rather than in the private channels they are used to. Then, a further two weeks ‘social training’ ensures the community norms of the social platforms they’ll be working on are fully understood.

Best Buy’s internal social media policy is publicly available on their website, and given to all employees in the company. This lays out clearly what employees should do (e.g. always say you work for Best Buy) and can’t do (e.g. leak confidential information) and re-enforces the company’s key principles for effective social media communication: “Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.”

E.g. Facebook: I’m sorry to hear that your purchase didn’t meet expectations. If you private message me your email address, I will send you a prepaid returns form and we’ll issue you a full refund. I hope that helps. Anna

Twitter: Sorry to hear about that. If you DM your email address, I’ll send a returns form for you to claim a full refund. AD

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How Best Buy Does It

How Best Buy Does It

Establish an approval process before ‘going live’

Create a checklist for crafting responses

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Once new agents have been given guidelines and training, managers should approve all responses they send for a fixed period of time. How long this lasts depends on how prepared your agents are for interacting in social media, and how prescriptive your brand guidelines need to be. Some companies approve all outgoing responses for 2 weeks, others for 3 months.

It may be that you wish to approve responses indefinitely, but as your customer service demand scales, your response time will be effective. Using the training tools we’ve illustrated in this guide allows you to make the most of your team.

A checklist of things to consider before posting a reply can aid and encourage your team to use their initiative. Template responses help for a number of messages, but you can also provide some triggers to help figure out a problem that doesn’t quite fit the mould. This allows social customer service agents to resolve more issues, faster, and ensures that you’re really delivering personalised support.

• Think first before hitting reply!

• Ask as many questions as possible to resolve in the fewest possible interactions

• Keep communication as public as possible, especially when negative

• Address issues raised directly

• when positive, agree and mirror enthusiasm

• when negative, show empathy

• Offer a public solution wherever possible (e.g. if X not available, you might like Y)

• Always try and end interactions on a positive note

How Best Buy Does ItFormalise a process for escalating problematic messages

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You should develop a comprehensive plan to determine when a message needs to be escalated. These chains of communication should be a reflection of the responsibilities established by your cross-departmental think tank. Customer complaints of a certain nature may need to go straight to the customer service manager and brand sensitive comments that could spark a PR crisis might go straight to the social media or PR team. As for tone of voice training, making exceptions clear will give your team the confidence to reply to all standard customer service issues efficiently. Your escalation process should be written down for everyone to see, with contact details for everyone involved.

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03ODEON Social Media Crisis management: Facebook & Twitter

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03These processes can be pulled together into a response map that directs agents to react in different ways depending on the content of a customer message, and incorporates triggers for escalation.

Altimeter has created an example response map, which illustrates how you might be able to create a similar decision tree for your own agents.

Source: www.telusinternational.com

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How you can understand and improve your social customer service program and keep track as you scale it

Level Three: Measuring and Refining04

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Now you’ve got some processes in place, what do you need to do to make sure they’re working for you? Targets should be based around customer expectations.

Your metrics for understanding the success of your social customer service program should be focussed around meeting these expectations.

Track these KPIs to ensure your team is delivering great social customer service.

• Quick responses are an important benchmark for those aiming to give quality service in fast-paced channel.

• Set SLAs to determine how quickly your team should be responding to queries and try to gradually improve on these. Whether you can offer 24 hour availability, or just business hours during the working week, make sure you have clear targets so that you can identify customers that get a below-par service experience and address their issues promptly. Aim for at least 80% of issues to be answered within your target response timeframe.

Throughout this guide, we’ve tried to illustrate that customers expect you to:

Be Fast

Be Useful

Be Friendly

Team PerformanceResponse Time

Take a look at when you’re actually receiving customer messages to understand how to meet your customers’ needs. It could be that you would catch the vast majority of all enquiries by adding an evening shift to your resources. Some of Conversocial’s customers have reviewed the time distribution of their incoming messages and found that a significant proportion are submitted between 6pm and 11pm. Adding and evening shift could dramatically reduce your average response time too.

Tip:

• It’s important to aim for consistency in your social customer service offering, and ensure that you answer as close to 100% of all customer service issues as possible. Identifying which messages are customer service issues and tracking how many of these get a response is the only way to get a true overview of the customers you’re helping.

Contact resolution – Queries answered

• Consider how well you are tackling social customer service on an individual level and as a whole team. You can do this by comparing individual response time averages to those of the team. It’s important to identify where staff members might be falling behind so that you can target training efforts and discover holes in your processes.

Benchmark Your Team

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04

Tracking sentiment in social media is one of the most straightforward ways of measuring customer satisfaction. It’s a great way to understand not only the attitudes of your existing customer base, but the impression projected of your brand. Sentiment serves as an effective social Net Promoter Score. The Net Promoter Score is based on the principle of establishing how many of your customers are promoters of your brand.

Traditionally, customer satisfaction and promotion are sought out proactively, often through surveys, but companies already have access to hundreds of customer opinions on Facebook and Twitter. These are great sources for understanding if customers are happy, and reflect net promoter in action, given their public nature. Tracking the sentiment of these messages gives you an accurate view of the real positive promotion and negative detraction happening on your social platforms right now. To get an accurate picture of customer satisfaction, you should record the sentiment of every message you receive.

The key to measuring sentiment consistently and effectively is to provide your social media staff with simple, clear guidelines for what constitutes positive or negative sentiment. The best way to do this is to ask the following question:

“If a friend saw this comment, would it improve or worsen their perception of the company?”

Saying “I shopped at ____” certainly isn’t negative... but it doesn’t quite promote the company either. Saying “I shopped at ____ and it was great” or “I love your new product ____!” both clearly promote the brand. To get the most accurate picture of customer satisfaction, unless actively positive, comments should be considered neutral.

If done correctly, you can discover the ‘net promoter score’ of your page just by comparing the percentage of positive and negative comments. Tracking this over time, on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis allows you to really understand your customers’ satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction Sentiment Data

Without software, the only way to accurately record customer sentiment is to manually log every comment and tweet. Logging and reporting by copying and pasting customer messages into a spreadsheet is extremely laborious.

Using Conversocial, you can quickly and easily mark your customers’ messages as positive or negative as you process them. This sentiment data can show the overall health of your Facebook and Twitter communities, but also be drawn out in relation to certain issues. A combination of sentiment tracking and issue tagging gives you a picture of what makes your fans and followers happy or unhappy.

How Conversocial Helps:

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Sentiment data gives you a simple and effective benchmark of your customer attitudes, but social networks offer a wealth of information that can tell you so much more. Your customers are coming to you with direct feedback on your products or services without having to be asked for it, and are discussing a wide range of topics that gives you invaluable insight into their behaviours, preferences and interests.

Track Key Customer Issues Feedback and Discussion

Source: Conversocial customers’ Facebook pages & Twitter accounts, Jan 2012

The only way to tap this data is to keep a full record of your messaging history, and organise it effectively for analysis. The trends you spot should be fed effectively into your company’s existing feedback, market research and voice of the customer processes. We’ve discovered that the vast majority of social messages that require your attention are either real customer service issues or direct product feedback. These can teach your company a thing or two about how you’re doing business.

What types of message are retailers receiving on Facebook and Twitter?

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When Facebook and Twitter become real customer service channels, it’s essential to keep track of customer reactions to different parts of your business, and the frequency of different customer issues. As customers redirect their complaints to social media, the understanding of customer service issues gleaned from data through other channels is diluted. And customers are much more forthcoming with simple issues, as taking a complaint to Facebook or Twitter is quick and easy. Track the frequency and sentiment of requests about different products, services and common issues.

If you spot a trend towards complaints about delivery, it’s probably about time to address the quality of your delivery service and investigate fundamental problems. Thorough logging and analysis of social customer service data is one of the best ways to identify how your company can target areas to fundamentally improve the customer experience.

Highlighting real service potholes.

Conversocial allows you to tag and categorise your incoming social messages to make the process of organising and analysing customer feedback easy and efficient. Whatever you want to track, you can view all relevant comments together and get a picture of relative volumes at a glance.

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Social Media has become well established as a mainstream communication channel between friends, but the social relationship between companies and their customers is just beginning.

We’ve already seen the evolution from social networks as marketing channels to gradually become established as two-way connectors between brands and consumers. Over the next year, we’ll shift more and more of our customer service demand to social media, and companies will need to adapt and reorganise themselves internally to keep up.

Social media is set to be the main communication channel to speak with a business, as it offers the most convenient and effective solution for consumers. More and more service issues that would previously never made it outside of one store are making their way to Facebook and Twitter, thanks to the convenience of mobile technology. Ever-increasing demands for immediacy will require more companies to deliver in-store service via social channels.

Forward-thinking companies are making moves to offer localised service through globally public platforms. As customers expect responses in real-time to specific local issues, soon it will make sense for store and branch managers to be integrated into social engagement programs. For a business to become truly social, marketing departments will have to release the reigns even further to better spread information throughout the company and out to customers. To keep up with customer demand, those who help to contribute information to customers and listen to what they have to say will need to expand beyond the contact centre.

Afterthought: The Future of Social Customer ServiceConversocial’s predictions on where your social customer service program will go next.

Social media presents everything a company has to offer to its customers through one united voice. In this guide we’ve only touched on the very first stages of breaking down departmental boundaries to offer customers a common experience. As customers’ needs from social networks develop, businesses will have to become truly socialised internally if they are ever to offer a sociable relationship with their customers externally.

Follow @conversocial on Twitter for social customer serviceinsights, and learn more at www.conversocial.com