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steps to social
customerservice success
by Danielle Sheerinconsultant at NixonMcInnes
published March 2013
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Creating your social customer service strategy
The 6 steps to social customer service success
Not already offering social customer service?
Already providing customer service via social channels?
About NixoncMcInnes
Step 1: Take a strategic approach
Step 2: Decide what your team looks like
Step 3: Create firm foundations for scaling
Step 4: Design a measurement framework
Step 5: Create a mandate for change
Step 6: Make a clear business case for investment
ConclusionOur contributors
Want to know more?
Contents:
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50% of consumers arealready using socialmedia to reach outfor customer service
and 74% think it willbecome a majorchannel in the future.Source: Conversocial
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Creating your social customer service strategy
The rise of the social customer has meant that brandscan no longer ignore the need to offer customer servicein social spaces.
The customer is now in charge and social offers them a space to talk
about your brand publicly. How you manage your response is key to your
brand’s reputation in the future.
At NixonMcInnes we have been instrumental in setting up social
customer service initiatives and providing strategic support for a number
of large organisations, including Barclays, FirstGroup and the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office.
We recently began a programme of roundtable conversations for these,
and other large brands to share their stories and discuss the challenges
they face in developing their social support teams.
We have distilled the wisdom from these sessions to provide a solid,
strategic approach for setting up and evolving your social customerservice initiative through to maturity.
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Take a strategic approach
Work out what your objectives are and put tactics in place for
achieving them. Move beyond customer service and broaden yourremit to include personal engagement with your community. Think
about the culture you want to engender in your community and use
this to understand the balance of support you need to provide.
Decide what your team looks like
What structure provides your customers with the best experience?
How do you make sure you can offer first class complaint
handling and query resolution but not sacrifice wider community
engagement? What type of people can bring your brand to life
on social?
Create firm foundations for scaling
Consider the processes and governance you need to have in place
to mitigate business risks and ensure quality and consistency of
customer experience. Clear procedures will make scaling your
social customer service initiatives simpler and reduce costs in
the long-term.
Design a measurement frameworkUnderstand how you can effectively and efficiently gauge the
success of your efforts. Work out what you need to measure and how
this relates to your traditional channels. What new metrics should
you also include in order to understand the unique benefits social
customer support offers?
Create a mandate for change
Recognise the business insights that your community can provide
and make sure that your business culture can capitalise on this byinnovating to meet customer needs, improve customer experience
and gain competitive advantage.
Make a clear business case for investment
Understand how efficiencies of scale can create ROI for your
customer service initiative. Use these steps to guide the design
of your own strategic plan for evolving your team, reducing the
reputational risks presented by unplanned expansion.
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If your brand is not already offering socialcustomer service:
If you do not yet offer customer service on social media,the chances are you are considering it.
You are probably discovering that if your customers want to complain on
social media, they will. By ignoring it, you do your brand no favours in the
long term.
Coupled with this is the fact that customers have a tendency to place a
high trust in peer reviews, so if a customer says something bad about
your product or service, the negative impact for your brand can ripple
around the web forever.
This is clearly a worrying situation, but social can equally work in your
favour. If you offer support to your customers on social spaces you
have the opportunity to turn them into advocates for your brand. And
by being seen to provide this value, you demonstrate to others your
commitment to quality and service and build their trust.
However, we understand that social customer service is not an easy thing
for a brand to adopt. For a business that is not used to engaging publicly
with its customers, it can appear to be fraught with risk. With this in mind
it can be hard to persuade senior management that the risks are worth it
and secure the support and investment you need to take your first steps.
This paper will help you build your internal business case,
mitigate those risks and provide a solid foundation for a
scalable social support team.
The estimated cost of poor customerservice to the overall UK economy is £15.3
billion per year. The average value (in oneyear) of each customer relationship lost to a
competitor or abandoned is £248.Source: Genesys & Datamonitor/Ovum
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If your brand is already providing socialcustomer service support:
If you have an existing social media customerservice presence, the chances are you set it up asa pilot project.
Perhaps you had an internal crisis or reputational issue that forced you
to handle customer complaints on social, or more likely, you set it up
because your customers demanded it or your competitor had begun to
offer it.
It is also a safe bet that since you started, you have probably received
an increase in volume and your existing team is currently feeling the
pressure.
The truth is, once you have started supporting customers on social
media, increased awareness of this service (and the benefits it offers) will
increase customer demand. This will force you to scale, so you’d do well
to be prepared for it.
This paper can give you some tried and tested methods
for scaling your social support teams in a structured and
manageable way, so you can realise the business benefit
from your initial setup investment.
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About NixonMcInnes
NixonMcInnes a social business consultancy workingwith major brands and large not-for-profits.
Clients include BBC, RBS, Cisco, Foreign &
Commonwealth Office, WWF & Nectar. We help to
guide, inspire and assist these organisations through the
digital disruption they face in the 21st century.
Our work addresses two important needs. The advanced use of socialtechnologies to bring people together. And the evolution of business
culture into a smart, collaborative and more digital environment.
NixonMcInnes was there at the beginning of social when organisations
were starting to explore how new tools could help them talk to
customers. To support our network in their quest to understand and
benefit from social within their organisations, we run a programme of
roundtables. These events give our clients and guests from other brands
the opportunity to share their stories and the challenges they face and
learn from others’ experiences.
This white paper distils the collective wisdom from a social customer
services roundtable that happened in January 2013.
@DanielleSheerin
01273 764010
To speak to Danielle about
how NixonMcInnes can help
you please get in touch:
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Step 1: Take a strategic approach
Stop for a moment and consider. Why are youdoing this?
Sure, you want to provide better customer support but support is not
simply about fixing problems – it’s about creating a better experience for
your customers by engaging with them to help them and to add value to
their interactions with your company.
Once you recognise that good social customer service design means
designing for engagement, you can start to work on tactics to
deliver this.
First Great Western’s initial focus for social
was customer service, but for a rail company,this does not always mean fixing problems for
customers. Social customer service extends
beyond pure problem solving and includes the
provision of useful information; you are there
to inform and support and the social medium
offers new ways to do this.
Jason Ness
First Great Western (FGW) – Customer Relations Manager
By offering social customer support you are creating a community for
your users to access and share information.
And by taking a broader view of customer support to include other formsof engagement you encourage customer participation.
Frontline story
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This provides you with the opportunity to create a more personal
relationship with your customers. And by learning from them and
understanding their needs, you will be better able to service them.
Effectively, this means you are designing to:
– Enable and amplify advocacy
– Create loyalty and retention
But key to effective customer engagement is balance.
A community that is purely based around reactive responses to customer
service queries is going to become pretty dull quite quickly and is going
to limit your ability to amplify your brand values.
On the other hand, a service channel that is overtly promotional or
marketing led is probably going to grate with customers who are trying
to access support.
The key is to make the channel about more than just servicing customer
issues, but also making it interesting and useful.
And if you want to get this blend right, then make sure you are viewing
it from your customer’s perspective. What does your community want? If
you are not sure, then why not ask your community?
We surveyed our customers to see if we weregetting the balance right. We have always tried to
keep the promotional stuff to a minimum and use
the channel as more of a customer service tool.
The trick is about getting the balance right for you.
Jo Coverley
First Great Western (FGW) – Social Media Manager
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In an ideal world, you will be able to cultivate a culture of mutual support
and self-servicing in your community.
You can encourage this by proactively providing relevant updates and
information to your community and by being open to the idea that peer-
to-peer support is something to value.
Additionally, you can reward users that help others by providing them
with rewards, for example: offering social recognition; providing them
with insider access to your products or giving vouchers and discounts.
A culture of self-service among your customers reduces calls andcontacts to your business massively. Additionally, an engaged,
enthusiastic community that is mobilised around your product or
service provides a level of third party validation. And as we know, if your
customers say you’re great, it counts for more than if your marketing
department say so.
At WWF UK, our preferred strategy is toconnect interest groups in social so they can
support each other. However, it is not as simple
as letting them get on with it. We need to help
the community to self-serve and a part of our
role is that of convener and connector.
Peta ThompsonWWF UK - Head of Supporter Care
Frontline story
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Step 2 - Decide what your team looks like
Typically, team structures for social customer servicereflect the level of maturity of the service in thebusiness.
Sure, you want to provide better customer support but support is not
simply about fixing problems – it’s about creating a better experience for
your customers by engaging with them to help them and to add value to
their interactions with your company.
Once you recognise that good social customer service design means
designing for engagement, you can start to work on tactics to
deliver this.
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Model 1 - Outsourced
Often social support initiatives begin with thecommunity management role being outsourced to
an agency or partner.
Unfortunately, this approach is usually the least
desirable, as outsourced staff often lack insider
knowledge of the brand and find it hard to replicate
the tone and personality of the organisation.
This makes it more of a challenge to engage with
customers and, at its most extreme, can present arisk to brand reputation.
Additionally, outsourcing social support to an
agency usually means that service issues have to be
channelled back to the business for handling. This
creates a cost overhead and also impacts service in
terms of speed and quality, creating a poor overall
customer experience.
According to one senior customer support manager
we spoke to:
B U S
INE S S
We found that outsourcing the work to
an agency doesn’t work very well because
they don’t have a very good link with customer
service teams. We had to find people who wereextremely multi-skilled. They needed to be able
to manage customer service side of things on
traditional channels, social channels and through
our ‘chat’ service on our website. Each one of
these channels behaves differently and requires
a different tone of voice.
Senior manager from large brand
O U
T SOU R C
E
C U S TOM
E R
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Model 2 – Marketing-led
In our experience it is also common for nascent socialcustomer service to be run by a marketing department.
This is natural because social usually evolves in
marketing, and it can be hard to wrestle it away from the
team that started it.
However, a marketing-led approach to social customer
service often creates additional overheads for the
business, as the marketing team are often ill-equipped
to deal with support issues and this risks a hand-off totraditional customer care teams.
Additionally, marketing departments often lack
appreciation for the importance of customer service
issues that arise in their social channel, and fail to
prioritise support engagements, meaning that the
customer experience can suf fer.
Typically, marketing teams are also quite small, so this
model for social support lacks long-term robustness, in
terms of capacity, for handling sudden support volume
increases, such as can occur in a PR crisis.
M A R K ET I N
G
C U S TOM
E R
C U S T O M ER S E
R V I C
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Model 3 – Customer service-led
Businesses with a more mature social customer servicemodel have often realised the challenges of these first
two approaches and have handed their social support
channels to their customer service teams to manage
directly.
This makes some sense, as the ability to have someone
handle queries at the point of contact is key to providing
good customer experience. However, it is not the whole
story.
What many businesses are now finding is that traditional
customer support skills don’t necessarily translate to
social. The old email and telephony channels require a
completely different tone and personality and simply
don’t work on Twitter and Facebook.
Additionally, it can be difficult to get call centre teams
to recognise the risks that social poses in terms of
amplification. This means there can be an educational
and cultural challenge in getting agents to prioritise
social.
Moreover, a customer support focus on social channel
management means it can be tricky to find the balance
between support and engagement messaging. This can
make these channels very ‘dry’ and brands can find they
are missing opportunities to connect more widely with
customers if the messaging on the channel is entirelyfocused on directing replies to personal support queries.
M A R K ET I N
G
C U S TOM
E R
C U S T O M ER S E
R V I C
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At O2 we characterise oursocial media interactions into three
broad areas: 1. Customer service
(a variety of customer enquiries).
2. General questions about our
business 3. Proactive activity to
deepen engagement.
We manage all this using one core
team to manage the workflow.
They tag each type of discussion
so that it goes to the relevant
team (i.e. customer service
related messages go to the team
managing customer service). This
is done all through one platform
and the core team acts as a
filter. They also work closely withthe press office and PR for the
general questions and proactive
engagement. In terms of skill sets
required - this team need to be
good at serving customers as well
as being PR savvy.
Dave Massey
Head of Communications Strategy& Reputation, O2
Frontline storyModel 4 – Hybrid team
To mitigate this, many brands are now starting to adopta hybrid model. In this approach, the social customer
service team will include representation from customer
service and marketing, ideally with close links to PR and
customer insight.
Many businesses find that this model allows them to
provide superior customer service without sacrificing the
personality and deeper engagement on the channel.
M A R K ET I N
G
C U S TOM
E R
C U S T O M ER S E
R V I C E
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Model 5 – Dedicated social customer agents
A closely aligned alternative to the hybrid model is for abusiness to train up a dedicated team of social customer
agents that handle all aspects of engagement.
These agents are usually sourced internally, often from
the existing customer support teams. However, they
are specially selected as demonstrating the right skills
and aptitudes for social media, and undergo extensive
training to ensure they can offer not only customer
support, but also engage more widely on social
channels.
Done properly, this model often works very well. With
the right agents, who have the right tone and passion
for social and can handle queries from first contact to
resolution, the business benefits from having lowered
operating costs and the customer benefits in terms of
speed and quality of service.
There are no hard and fast rules to selecting your
model of social customer service and you’ll need to
assess the best approach, based on what works best for
you and your business. However, if you have resource
and you plan to scale, the hybrid team or dedicated
social customer agent models are by far the most
cost-effective, scalable and offer the best customer
experience.
Whatever model you operate, having the right typeof personality manning your social customer support
channel is essential.
The truth is that even with a background in customer
service and the necessary social media training, not
everyone is suited for social customer service. Truly
great social customer service requires a particular
blend of personality traits and characteristics, including:
confidence, tact, judgement, insight, empathy, creativityand humour.
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They will also need first-rate writing skills and the ability
to present information accurately in brief updates,
without sacrificing warmth and personality.
We strongly recommend that if you are serious about
social customer service, you create a social agent
development programme, so you can proactively identify
and assess staff that demonstrate these qualities, as
potential new agents for your team.
A dedicated team of social response
experts is a necessity, particularly as you embark
on social media for the first time. The team
need to have real focus on customer experience
whilst having a deep knowledge around tone
of voice & excellent communication skills.
Although this team should sit separately from
your business as usual teams, it is essential thatthey stay connected; the message or information
received by customers should be the same on
every channel regardless of whether this is more
traditional or digital.
Richard Atkinson
Senior Manager – Web Relations, Barclaycard
Frontline story
S O C
I A L AG
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T
C U S TOM
E R
S O C
I A L AG
E N
T
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Step 3 – Create firm foundations for scaling
Once you are clear about how you want to structureyour team and have identified who you want on it, youwill need clearly defined process for preparing them forthe role so you can scale efficiently.
Here we move into the realm of governance and process.
There is a tendency for these elements to be considered boring or
stifling in some businesses. But a good set of guidelines should protect
your business, and enable your team to operate confidently and deliver
service more effectively.
For example, would your team know what to do if a reputational issue
raised its head on your Twitter feed? Or a customer abused one of your
agents? Or all your agents were off sick? Or a computer glitch stopped
you delivering your product? Or one of your agents accidentally sent a
personal message from your business account?
If you don’t have guidelines, procedures and processes in place to deal
with these types of eventuality, the result is chaos. You are unable to
deliver your social customer service whilst the issue is going on (which
pushes customers back to the more expensive traditional service
channels), and you and your colleagues are left desperately trying to
‘firefight’ the issue internally.
It is essential to work out what policies you need and get them in place
before you begin delivering social customer service.
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Essential foundations
As a baseline, we consider the following to be essential:
– Complaints handling processes
– Internal escalation lists
– Social media tone of voice/response guidelines
– Service level agreements (SLAs)
– Crisis management planning
– Training and induction programmes for new agents
You may also need processes that are specific for your business. Either
way, make sure they are defined before you have cause to use them.
Complaint handling processes
Ideally you want to ensure that your social agents can handle queries
end-to-end, so you don’t pass customers from a low cost solution to a
higher one.
With larger teams, you may also need some method of managing
workflow. Also consider how you will integrate your social complaint
handling with existing systems to ensure a joined up customer
experience and enable social support to be consistently reported with
other channels.
If you have a hybrid team model of social customer support, you might
also need processes to enable ‘gatekeepers’ on your social spaces to
assess whether a customer engagement constitutes a query, comment
or complaint, and how, and by whom, it should be handled. In these
instances where you have a hand-off procedure in operation, consider
how you will track queries and ensure that satisfactory resolution occurs.
You will also need to develop a back up support plan in case of agent
sickness. This might mean drafting in part of your marketing team to
manage or provide support on the channel in an emergency. Processes
and procedures should be in place to support them in directing and
managing customer service queries if this occurs.
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Internal escalation lists
Even if you have a team of dedicated social support agents, not allqueries will be simple, and you will need to have a plan for routing
complex issues, as well as an internal SLA to make sure you get a timely
response and your customers’ expectations are met.
Firstly, you will need to identify your in-house experts and make sure you
have an up to date list of their contact details and their area of expertise.
Those colleagues will need to be briefed on their role in the support
process and apprised of your expectations of them.
They need to be prepared to collaborate with each other to develop
effective responses in the instance of very complex issues (e.g. PR may
need to liaise with the product development team to construct and
response plan, if a new product fails in the market).
You will also need a way of capturing any solutions identified by these
wider expert teams for reuse by your social customer agents.
This means opening routes for dialogue across your business and
connecting your team deep within the organisation. An understanding of
the pivotal role that the social customer service team plays needs to be
embedded on your wider corporate culture.
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At First Great Western we regularly monitor agents for
tone, correct information, spelling/grammar and adherence to
SLAs.Jason Ness
First Great Western (FGW) – Customer Relations Manager
Tone of voice/response guidelines
Guidelines for tone and response on social media are essential fortraining new social customer agents, and can provide reassurance and
protection for businesses.
However, even with comprehensive guidelines in place, you cannot
always assess how well an individual will respond, especially when they
are under pressure in a genuine social customer situation.
One approach to gauging this and training staff in a safe manner is to
test new social agents in simulated customer care situations.
This can be as simple as a paper-based test that gathers responses to
sample customer queries selected from your social account, through to
high tech simulations that create a test environment that can mimic a
range of potential customer issues and volumes.
These types of simulation are incredibly valuable, as they help you
identify those agents that will be able to handle the pressure that social
brings, providing succinct but human responses in a calm and measured
way.
Even with your team in place, you should regularly monitor and assessthe quality of their responses to ensure that agents are meeting
expectations.
One organisation that we have worked with has even empowered its
agents to assess themselves, and their social customer service team has
started a Tweet of the Week competition, publicly endorsing the agent
that demonstrated the best engagement.
This is a great idea as this type of self-assessment builds learning in theteam and boosts confidence and morale.
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Service level agreements (SLAs)
Twitter is often described as being real-time and customers expect areal-time response when they use it to complain.
In some businesses this urgency is further amplified due to the nature
of their service, e.g. public services or transport companies, where a
timely response is essential for the information to be of value. But in all
businesses customer expectations on social are high.
This means that you need to manage customer expectations and this
means defining a realistic but relevant SLA.
Once you have defined it, let your customers know about it (and in what
hours it applies). Commit to it and live up to it.
If you don’t meet customer expectations on social, they will go to other
channels - usually phone. So by not having an SLA, or by not sticking toit, you risk moving people from your lowest cost solution to the highest.
Of course, in times of crisis, when contact volumes increase dramatically,
sticking to your SLAs might not be possible.
In which case, manage customer expectations by using holding
messages, situation updates and broadcasting general information to
your followers. By sharing relevant information, you make it visible to the
wider public and head off complaints. The right information at the righttime can transform a customer’s experience and even save a reputation.
We only have two people on Twitter during the day and
one person in the early and late hours so we can’t always
reply to every question, especially in times of disruption. We
manage this by broadcasting service updates rather than
doing individual updates, and set expectations of how we
manage our account in our twitter rules of engagement.Myriam Walburger
Head of Communications, First Capital Connect
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Crisis management planning
This means making sure that social channels are firmly integrated intoyour wider business crisis handling procedures, so that PR messages can
be prioritised on social channels, and social customer agents are trained
and empowered to update customers on the situation as far as possible.
Make provision for out of hours crisis cover on social and if necessary,
train PR staff on social tools so that they can provide frontline support.
A good social crisis management plan should also have specific
procedures in place for dealing with reputational issues that have arisenin social channels, giving guidance on how to handle various situations,
such as how to handle aggressive customer, what to do when your
account is hacked or if one of your staff accidentally or deliberately
breaches your social media guidelines.
Teams will need to be able to spot and assess potential reputational
issues brewing on social, and know how and when to manage and diffuse
them or hand them off to PR for mitigation.
Training and induction planning
If you want to scale, you will need to have a clear process for recruiting,
inducting and training new agents, as well as a handover/clean-up
process to manage security when agents leave. In terms of training, it
makes sense to empower your existing agents to train new colleagues,
as this will save costs in the long run. Additionally, you will get a better
quality of training, as these people will be au-fait with the nuances of
your processes and the day-to-day challenges that your business faces
on social.
Remember to review and update your training and process guides
regularly to account for new features and functionality on social tools and
to make examples and case studies relevant and recent for trainees.
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Step 4 – Design a measurement framework
With your social customer service team in place, you willneed to have some method for assessing its effectivenessand the impact it is having onyour business.
This means you will need to set some metrics and have a procedure for
regularly measuring, reporting and reviewing them.
But how you decide what you measure? There will be numerous things
you could measure but how do you decide which of them are relevant and
useful to your business?
This is where a measurement framework comes in. Tying metrics to a
framework that supports your core business strategy gives you a means of
making sense of the myriad data available and capturing the insight that
really matters.
Broadly speaking, a measurement framework provides a structure to help
you map your desired business objectives to customer outcomes that can
then be tracked with the relevant metrics.
For example, if improved brand reputation is a core objective for your
organisation, then consider the types of customer outcomes that might
inform you on your progress towards this goal on social.
Outcomes that reflect an improvement in brand reputation might be:
– People talking more positively about your brand
– Customers expressing a positive reaction after receiving support
– A willingness to share or retweet your content among their peers
Once you have this list of outcomes, you can then work out the metrics
you can measure to track these outcomes. For example, for the list above,
suitable metrics might include: positive vs. negative brand mentions,
net promoter score (NPS), number of customers converted to satisfied
customers through social care interaction, number of shares/retweets, etc.
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So, for this particular objective, your measurement framework might
look like this:
Improve brand reputation
People talking about us online positively
Customers expressing a positive reaction
Willingness to share/RT brand content
Positive vs. negative brand mentions
Improved NPS
Number of customers converted to satisfied
Number of shares/RTs
Objective
Outcome
Metrics
Now repeat this exercise for all of the business objectives that you are
trying to achieve with your social customer service initiative. Once you
have done this, you will have a solid framework for assessing the impact
of your efforts.
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Tie your metrics to your existing management reporting
Another consideration when you are designing your measurementframework is to ensure that, where possible, your metrics tie into your
existing business reporting.
This helps you to benchmark your social customer care efforts against
your traditional customer support models and gives an indication of how
you are impacting traditional channels, and how the costs and ROI stacks
up across channels.
However, traditional call centre metrics do not always translate well into
social media and like-for-like comparisons are not always possible. In
these instances, it can be useful to map similar metrics to each other to
see how they relate.
Traditional metrics
Satisfaction ratings
Call volume
Abandon rate
First-time resolutions
Average handling time
Agent utilisation
Transfer rate
Sentiment analysis/number ofpositive responses due to resolution
Number of social customer supportrequests submitted
Number of issues not responded toin pre-defined amount of time
Number of issues resolved in first
response
Average response time
Average responses in pre-definedamount of time
Number of response escalations
Social metrics
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Social metrics
Cross-matching your metrics to traditional call centre metrics does not
tell the whole story and to truly measure the effectiveness of your social
customer service initiatives, you will need to consider a range of KPIs,
including marketing and insight measures, as well as entirely new social
success indicators that that might require a shift in business thinking.
Focusing solely on service metrics (which are largely based around
reducing and speeding up customer contacts) does not allow you track
measures that indicate the real power and benefit of social customercare.
Social customer care is about building for advocacy and insight, and
this means looking at longer-term measures such as: brand buzz
and customer amplification; lead generation from social; customer
engagement levels and quality; community health and self/peer support
levels; positive customer stories and insights; ideas generated and
lifetime customer value.
This information might also help you assess cost savings gained
through providing social support for example, to indicate:
– Number of calls deflected from call centre
– Prevention of contact with call centre due to broadcast
messaging of information
– Cost to service customer through social channels vs.
traditional channels
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One of the biggest but most oftenoverlooked opportunities that socialcustomer care offers is insight.
By creating a social customer support community and
building a relationship with your customers on these
spaces you have a means to uncover their opinions
and attitudes.
You can learn about how they perceive your company
and products, how they use them and what you are
failing them on.
This can help you improve your support so that common
complaints are addressed at source and can also provide
insight for new product and service development as well
as ideas for product improvement and innovation that
can give you a competitive edge.
However, to make use of any of this information you need
the support of your management team. Your executive
team must appreciate the benefits of social customer
service and recognise the power of the insights it offers
before you can get any traction.
Senior management must prioritise the collation of this
information and insight and provide clear routes throughthe organisation to ensure it reaches the relevant
departments. They must encourage and facilitate a
culture of cooperation and collaboration for this insight
to turn into new ideas and, above all, they must set a
clear mandate that if customers demand a change, then
the business must respond.
A further benefit of using
dedicated resources to manage
your social media presence is
that you can create a true focuson implementing change. Your
customers will be completely
honest in social media & by using
this voice of the customer data you
can react to their growing needs
and where appropriate instigate,
manage & fulfil change based
on their feedback. Alongside
the many benefits of listening to
your customers & implementing
change, this also allows you to
more accurately track ROI. For me
this means moving from justifying
your social model as “it’s the
right thing to do” into “this is the
cost we’ve saved the business &
the customer experience we’veimproved”. What better reason
do you need to justify this to your
stakeholder?
Myriam Walburger
Head of CommunicationsFirst Capital Connect
Step 5 – Create a mandate for change
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Step 6 - Make a clear business case for investment
You have already reached a point where your customersare demanding social customer support, so the needis clear.
It is common that businesses recognise this and create their initial social
customer service offering in response to this.
However, as we have identified, it is not long before customer demand
grows and businesses are not always so keen to invest more money to
meet that demand.
The fact is, there are set-up costs in creating a social customer service
team, including; internal planning, management tool selection and
purchase, agent training, process creation and system integration, as well
as the cost of delivering the service while you are finding your feet.
However, these costs are scalable – if you grow your team, you willalready have the core elements in place and selecting and training a
larger team does not incur the same overhead.
And once the team is in place, the cost savings are significant. You can
reduce call centre volumes (by servicing more cheaply on social but also
broadcasting support information to a wider audience). You can reduce
times to answer queries. You can increase the number of concurrent
conversation that agents can handle (compared with phone). And you
can increase customer satisfaction and retention levels.
The point is that if you don’t scale your team, you will never recoup your
initial setup costs and your customers will just keep using your traditional
service channels.
Moreover, if you fail to scale, you risk providing a poor social customer
experience, which can impact your reputation and your retention levels.
Your business case needs to consider the impact of not making this
investment.
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Conclusion
Fortunately, building your business case willbe simpler if you take a strategic approachsimilar to the one we have outlined above, asthis will provide you with a tried and trustedmodel for building your support team, aswell as a means of defining how you will
measure and monitor its success.
This reduces the risk to your managementteam and allows them to focus on thebenefits it can bring to your business, whichin turn will benefit your customers.
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Ruth Tapley
Online manager
AIMIA
Jason Ness
Customer relations manager
FGW
Peta Thompson
Supporter care team leader
WWF
Scott Andrews
Consular digital manager
FCO
Matt BrazilCOO - EMEA
Conversocial
Christine Olding
Community manager
Teletext Holidays
Clair Boon
Digital media communications team manager
TUI
Dave Massey
Head of communications strategy & reputation
O2
Jo Coverley
Social media manager
FGW
Thank you to our contributors
Lauren McKenzie
Digital marketing
ScotRail
Josh March
Founder
Conversocial
Edd Berrill
VRM performance manager
Barclays
Cat Cleary
Social response analyst
Barclays
Paul FalkenerHead of operations
Serco
Myriam Walburger
Head of communications
First Group
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