6 Steps to Social Customer Service Success (1)-1

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steps to social

customerservice success

by Danielle Sheerinconsultant at NixonMcInnes

published March 2013



Six steps to social customer service success 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:

http://www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk/futureproofsubscribe






50% of consumers arealready using socialmedia to reach outfor customer service

and 74% think it willbecome a majorchannel in the future.Source: Conversocial


http://www.conversocial.com/why

http://www.conversocial.com/why






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.







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


http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/%3Fp%3D1467

http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/%3Fp%3D1467






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.







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.

[email protected]

@DanielleSheerin

01273 764010

To speak to Danielle about

how NixonMcInnes can help

you please get in touch:







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







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







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







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.







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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.







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

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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.







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.







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.







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.







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







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.







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.







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.







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







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







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







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.







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.







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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6 Steps to Social Customer Service Success (1)-1

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