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Introductionto Social Customer Care

A best practices guide

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Contents

The Rise of Social Customer Care

Who Should Be Doing It?

Case Study: TUI Travel

What It Takes To Be Successful

Conclusion: To Be or not To Be Socially Devoted

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The brands with great Social Customer Care see it as a ROI driver and cost-saver

Based on a 2013 Socialbakers survey of 200 Socially Devoted companies

The Rise of Social Customer CareIn this paper we explore Social Customer Care, and give you insight into the value it represents for all brands. We’ll discuss who should be doing it, what it takes to create a social workflow, and how to analyze your performance for organized and optimized Social Customer Care.

We also present a case study on TUI Travel to show you how one of the world’s leading leisure travel groups evolved from a traditional to a real-time social business with the best response rates in the travel industry.

Social media has changed the way people learn about and develop relationships with brands. People are increasingly turning to social first for forming their purchasing decisions with feedback from friends and interaction with brands.

On branded Facebook Pages’ open Walls, which we strongly recommend brands keep, customers post remarks, questions, and other communications not exactly directed at Page admins. Brands are beginning to realize that in order to win over fans in a competitive social environment, they have to talk to all of their fans on social – it’s not a chore, it’s a necessary service.

What we’re seeing is the gradual co-evolution of social team roles with customer service. This fusion, of customer service with social media, has given rise to multi-channel Social Customer Care.

Brands that recognize the value of engaging with their customers all the time, not just via paid promotions and call centers, have started to restructure their teams to focus increasingly on near real-time customer care provided.

Gone are the days of “Your question is very important us, please hold for the next available representative.” Your customers require answers now. And they aren’t shy anymore: over 25 % of user posts on company’s Facebook Pages are questions.

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Social Customer Care - Who Should Do It?The short answer is that everyone with a product, service, government, or charity should get involved in

Social Customer Care.

According to our data, the industries that top Social Customer Care in 2014 are Airlines, Telecom and

Finance on Facebook, and Services, Airlines, and Finance on Twitter. These industries have embraced

social because their customers have embraced them on social. And it’s exciting to see that brands in

these industries have not ignored the call, answering the highest percentages of questions posted on

their walls (Response Rate).

If we look at the big picture on Facebook, the top 10 global brands in Social Customer Care (by Response

Time) come from several different industries. This means that customers everywhere are demanding

social care, and the brands that answer are getting a head start on the frontier of social business.

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Advantages of Social Customer CareMonitoring social media channels in order to swoop in and provide service and/or correct, on-brand

messaging strengthens customer relationships and promotes your brand. The tricky part to doing that

right is to create a workflow which enables your team to monitor and respond quickly and effectively.

So, should you offer Social Customer Care? We believe the advantages are clear. Meeting customers on

their terms by providing Social Customer Care allows you to promote your brand and steer the conversation.

It’s a form of advertising that breeds loyalty and conversions through conversation and care.

The purpose of our Socially Devoted benchmark, which recognizes brand Pages that respond to at least

65% of user questions, is to reward brands that actively demonstrate a commitment to serving customers

on social media – brand like TUI Travel, that top the Socially Devoted ladder in several categories.

In brief, there are three significant advantages to doing Social Customer Care which apply to all brands.

On social, your brand is

customer service where your customers demand it (increasing value of relationships).

its mission and values (reputation management).

the conversation (the return of the spokes person).

Promoting

Providing

Steering

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Case Study: TUI TravelTUI Travel is one of the world’s leading leisure travel groups, with 220 trusted brands operating globally and

more than 30 million customers. TUI strives to “go the extra smile” to make holiday experiences personal,

effortless, and truly memorable. Social media is a huge part of that.

For TUI, social is the new word-of-mouth. People love to talk, reminisce, share, and boast about their

holidays. 52% of people are searching for travel ideas on social and, while on holiday, 72% post photos to

social networks. Social gives TUI the opportunity to engage with customers throughout the entire journey

- before, during, and even after the holiday. TUI receives over 3000 questions a month across its various

brands. TUI also uses social to listen to its customer wishes, crowdsourcing for new ideas and personalizing

its marketing efforts. TUI now has the ability to reach out and communicate on a personal level with its

target audience on a daily basis. Engaging TUIs customers also leads to increased customer loyalty.

TUI’s main challenges are two-fold: managing and coordinating hundreds of social properties around

the world, and providing top-notch customer care for its clients. Social media gave them an immediate,

inexpensive answer to the latter.

But before Socialbakers, TUI did not have any solution for measuring and optimizing social. Every market

had its own social media strategy and used different tools. There was no group overview or ability to align

KPIs. Since November 2012, TUI has partnered with Socialbakers on their journey to become a truly social

business. The relationship has since evolved and expanded to include regular calls and training sessions

provided by Socialbakers. The social strategy at the group level was created with TUI’s vision, to be the best

social travel company in the world, in mind. TUI has set its social media campaign KPIs in cooperation with

Socialbakers so they are getting the right insights to measure the performance and take actions accordingly

- at every level of the organization.

With common KPIs and competitor benchmarking it is much easier to communicate TUI’s performance and

strategy actions. Social now gets the visibility that it should. Socialbakers helped TUI create and optimize

a scalable Social Customer Care solution. Local representatives are now involved in social communication

and can answer questions from, and provide assistance to, customers at all stages of their holidays. By

using this solution, TUI’s social team was also better able than ever to show their Executive Board the

business value of top-notch Social Customer Care.

For example, if one of TUI’s customers has a question about Mallorca, they will be able to directly engage

with a TUI travel expert right there in Mallorca. Local experts are now empowered to respond to customers

directly. It’s no wonder that in Q1 2014, the first four places in the Socially Devoted travel industry rank

belonged to TUI brands.

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“Before Socialbakers, our Question Response Rate was around 57%. In just two quarters, it jumped to 97%.” Amy Brix, TUI’s European

E-commerce Executive

Thanks to Socialbakers, TUI employees spend less time gathering data, can easily share best practices

across markets, and no longer need to convince their Executive Board about the importance of social

media, among other benefits. The partnership has transformed their brand.

In just two quarters, their Question Response Rate improved from 57% to 97% and their Question Response

Time fell from 12 hours to 4.5 hours. All of TUI’s largest brands now respond to customer queries within

1 hour - one of them, Arke, went from needing 17 hours to respond to taking only 40 minutes. Customers

noticed - user posts increased by 10% within 5 months.

Three TUI brands are now in the Top 5 most Socially Devoted travel brands on Facebook: Startour is

5th with response rate of 99%; First Choice is 3rd with response rate of essentially 100%; and Thomson

Holidays is the most Socially devoted travel brand, with 1231 answered questions and a response rate of

99%.

With Socialbakers, TUI has become a brand that puts social media at the heart of customer care and is well

on its way to achieving its goal of becoming the best social travel company in the world.

SOCIALLY DEVOTED SOCIALLY DEVOTED

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What It Takes to be SuccessfulThe goal is to promote your brand and engage with your community effectively on social. It’s a process

of organizing and optimizing your brand for a faster, more agile customer service. It’s a big job, but as

TUI demonstrates, with the right tools and the right mindset, you can organize and optimize your social

workflow. We’re still talking about customer service, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel – but the

time has come to put that wheel on a newer car.

To help you organize and manage your social community, there’s Socialbakers Builder; for measuring

your Page and Post performances competitively, there’s Socialbakers Analytics.

Socialbakers Builder lets you manage hundreds of conversations across multiple social networks with ease, and makes it incredibly easy to give real, thoughtful answers to everyone that connects with your brand on social. Because giving real customer support is worth it all the time.

Organizing your content and community with Socialbakers BuilderA social publishing platform is not only an effective way of publishing your content on social, but a central hub to organize your real-time customer service. How so? Socialbakers Builder, gives you command and control of your teams, content, and customer response by allowing you to:

1. Assign team members. By deciding who in your company has rights to respond, you keep multiple teams organized while expanding customer service to include each relevant department. This also provides a structure that helps prevent unwanted mistakes from happening and leaves a clear path of responsibility for published content.

2. Filter content. Your solution must be able to filter which queries have been assigned, answered, or possibly missed.

3. Report on your performance. Add feedback results into your workflow. Your tool needs to offer you an effective way to analyze your key metrics. You need to see reports on who among your team members is answering the most questions the earliest.

4. Communicate internally among team members. Naturally, because Social Customer Care works in real-time, so must your team. It’s critical that everyone is able to contact one another through the solution.

5. Manage user rights. So you should always be in command of who is communicating on behalf of your company. You might consider if all team members should have full administrator rights. As with assigning posts according to role, managing user rights helps prevent lurking disasters.

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Optimizing your engagement with Socialbakers AnalyticsTo get the most out of your data compare your performance to region and industry benchmarks, and to

the competitors you select. Yes, we’re talking about analytics as a tool to improve customer care. We’re

talking about turning data into insights, and insights into action. To do Social Customer Care well, let

alone exceptionally, it’s helpful to break it down into as many metrics as are necessary. Doing so enables

a practice that Socialbakers calls insights to action.

That is the ability to optimize Social Customer Care based on competitive intelligence. Without analytics

to measure, study, and inform your performance, you won’t be able to get your Social Customer Care

off the ground. It wasn’t until TUI saw their middling Question Response Rates and Question Response

Times for each region that they were able to go about taking steps to change how they communicated

with their customers on social.

You can easily find yourself using several tools just to keep up with the most basic metrics. Or, you can use

Socialbakers Analytics, a single tool to monitor all of them and constantly improve your abilities with insights.

Providing care where your customers demand it, promoting your brand’s values, and steering the

conversation on social is a big job. And like any big job, it requires knowledge and tools to perform well.

Socialbakers Builder and Analytics give your brand the organization and optimization it needs to analyze,

engage, and promote your brand through Social Customer Care.

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Conclusion: To Be or Not to Be Socially DevotedThe main difference between traditional and social businesses are that the latter have the tools to

organize and optimize their brand’s performance. Businesses that aren’t yet totally social need the right

social media management tools to make that transition.

Socialbakers Builder and Socialbakers Analytics give you the traction you need to thrive in your social

media landscape. Social Customer Care represents not only a market for your brand, it represents the

future of your business. With the right insight-driven tools, you are everywhere your customers need

you to be.

Meanwhile, stay tuned to Socialbakers for more insights, tools, and thought leadership for improving

social media performance. And join the discussion on Twitter to let us know how you feel about Social

Customer Care and becoming #SociallyDevoted.