The definitive guide to Social Customer Service (2nd edition)

The definitive guide to Social Customer Service

2

What is Social Customer Service?

Social Customer Service is now recognized as one of the most important points of contact between companies and their customers. Through best practice examples and practical advice, this guide explores why social for customer service is your most critical business need, and how it can support the interests of your entire organization.

Social communication is not a new phenomenon, but many remain unsure of how to leverage it for business. Today, the most successful companies are moving from ‘social for social’s sake’ to use social communication to achieve strategic goals.

For example, Gartner outlines four core integrations for social media into existing disciplines: Social for Customer Service, Social for E-commerce, Social for Marketing and Social for Sales.*

The first edition of Conversocial’s Definitive Guide to Social

Customer Service offered advice for companies looking to setup

a basic Social Customer Care team, but in just the past year

customer expectations have accelerated rapidly, demanding that

brands respond with mature engagement strategies that provide

true value. In this edition of the guide, Conversocial has wisely

taken the social media framework and best practice examples

a step further, outlining how to develop a highly skilled team

that’s connected to the enterprise while delivering on metrics

that justify the value of Social Customer Service at scale. At the

end of the last guide, Conversocial CEO Joshua March predicted

that companies would move beyond early dabblings in Social

Customer Service by reorganizing internally around a social

experience that permeates the entire company. I’ve begun to see

this happen in smart, nimble companies that understand that social

customer service is an opportunity for deep engagement. My hope

is that this guide will help you take advantage of this chance to

differentiate your service and, ultimately, your brand.

- Evan Shumeyko, Head of Ogilvy Social Customer Care Practice

“

“

* “The Preposition Makes All The Difference When You Go From Social CRM to Social for CRM” Published February 2013.

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Contents Making the case for Social Customer ServiceIn this section we explain how Social Customer Service is vital to success in multiple areas of your business.

Level one: Creating a Social Engagement HubIt’s important to define the people, processes and tools for customer engagement through social channels.

Read these steps to develop your Social Engagement Hub, whether you’re introducing a Social Customer Service team to your business for the first time, or want to restructure to integrate social engagement business-wide.

• What the Social Engagement Hub looks like

• How to understand customer demand on social channels

• How to support your entire business through Social Customer Service

01

02

In this section we explore:

Level two: Building a Social Customer Service MachineHow do you put theory into practice and develop processes to meet the unique demands of the Social Engagement Hub?

Read these best practice suggestions on how to run a Social Customer Service operation that delivers an amazing experience to your customers and value to your business.

• How to get to real customer issues, quickly

• How to deliver socially-savvy service that meets – or beats – customer expectations

• How to prepare for the unexpected: escalation and crisis response

• Best practice hiring and training

• Proactive customer service

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Level three: Measure, Refine and ScaleHow do you know how your program measures up?

Read these recommendations and calculations to develop and grow your Social Customer Service in a valuable way.

• Industry analysis of the value of Social Customer Service

• Quality measures on the value to the customer

• Effectiveness measures for the impact of your program

• Actionable insight for real business changes

• How to measure ROI

04


Making the Case for Social Customer ServiceSection 01

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Making the Case for Social Customer Service

Social Customer Service is now fully established as a consumer requirement; millions of people are taking service issues to social channels as their preferred communication route. These questions and complaints are public, and the only real option available for businesses is how, not if, they will respond. The idea of one-way social marketing has become antiquated,

1. You can’t ignore Social Customer Servicebut despite this many businesses still fail to understand just how critical a serious Social Customer Service program has become. Listening is no longer an end, but rather a means to evaluating where you need to engage. If you find yourself justifying the cause for good social care, the best arguments come from your customers.

The first and absolutely most important thing you should do in social media is listen to your consumers/custom-

ers and answer their questions. You should work out how to do this before you figure out how to drive ‘likes’ on

Facebook, what content to produce or how to measure engagement. Because if you do this, consumers will

‘like’ the brand, rather than just the Facebook page

- Richard Stacy, Social Media Trainer, Social Media Architecture

“ “

Consumers Demand Social Customer Service

Social customer careusers who engage

every day

People who think socialmedia will become the next

tier of customer service

People who thinkcompanies should offercustomer support on their profiles

“I want to speak with a real person”

“We want to engage with you on the go”

#listentome

01 04

02 05

03 06

18-24 year olds who use social media for customer care

Social media users whoprefer to reach out to a

brand for customer serviceover social channels

Social customer careusers who engage severaltimes a month

59% 1/3

51%

78%63%

9%

01

6

Due to the public nature of questions and complaints on social media, fear about brand damage and PR crises is one of the primary drivers for the creation of Social Customer Service teams. Social media demands a new approach to crisis, where corporate silence or PR statements fail to satisfy expectations

2. Your Reputation Depends on Social Customer Servicefor social brands. Delivering a high level of personalized engagement is the best way to combat negativity online, which ultimately affects the bottom line. Your social reputation is worth a great deal to your customers, and can affect how much they are worth to you.

Consumers that are affected by other customers’ comments on your page

1 negative customermessage in public can wipe

out the effect of up to 5positive ones

83%

88%

The Consequenses Of Ignoring Social Customer Service

01 04

02 05

06

96.5%

03Consumers who will beless likely to buy from you after seeing unanswered questions

Customers experiencingpositive social care are 4xmore likely to endorse you

than those who don’t

The biggest cause of1 decade of social media

crises was poor customerexperiences shared online

Social media users whohave abandoned a purchaseafter poor customer service

01

7

Social Customer Service pays off. Satisfied social customers are more loyal to your brand, increasing lifetime customer value. By managing customers’ issues publicly on social channels, you can expand the reach of your team and reduce your cost to serve. On social media, agents can handle more queries, more rapidly, and customers can find solutions shared with others before they need to ask.

3. Your Customer Relationships will Benefit from Social Customer Service

Social is more efficientEncouraging customers to use social channels for customer care by offering a better experience can help reduce the cost to serve. 70% of consumers who use social media for customer service are likely to do so again if they are satisfied with their experience. But for those who try and have an unsatisfactory experience, only 41% will try again.*

According to a recent report from Gartner, the social CRM agent can manage four to eight times more high-value interactions, compared with a traditional, voice-based contact center agent.**

Sources:

* http://nmincite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NM-Incite-Report-The-State-of-Social-Customer-Service-2012.pdf

** Use This Beginner’s Guide to Outsourcing Social CRM

† Bain and Company, American Express

http://about.americanexpress.com/news/docs/2012x/AMEX_Service_Infographic.pdf

http://www.social-exposure.com/engaged-customer-spend-more-and-are-more-loyal/

Social increases customer valueCustomers who engage with your company on social channels are likely to spend 20-40% more than those who don’t.† Quality interaction is a major differentiator for most industries, and can set your offering apart from your competitors. While robust social customer care takes hold as the industry norm, companies have a major opportunity to stand out as customer-centric.

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8

Where are you now?

Elementary Explorer Advocate

Marketing

Inactive

No Resolution

Customer Service

Reactive

First Contact Resolution

Social Engagement Hub

Proactive

Pre-contact Resolution

We developed the Definitive Guide to Social Customer Service to help take your program to Advocate status, no matter where you fall on the maturity scale.

What do the experts say?

Source:

Altimeter: The Evolution of Social Business

The Six Stages of SocialBusiness Transformation.

PlanningListen &

Learn

Understand how customers use social

channels

Prioritize strategic goals where social can have

most impact

PresenceStake our

claim

Amplify existing marketing e�orts

Encourage sharing

EngagementDialog Deepens

Relationships

Drive consideration to

purchase

Provide direct support

Internal employee engagement

ConvergedBusinessis Social

Social drives transformation

Integrates social philosophy into all

aspects of the enterprise

FormalizedOrganiseFor Scale

Set governacefor social

Create discipline& process

Strategic businessgoals

StrategicBecome A

Social Business

Scale across business units

Moves into HR, Sales, Finance & Supply Chain

C-level Involvement

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Level one: Creating a Social Engagement HubSection 02

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Level one: Building A Social Engagement Hub Around Your Customer

No two companies are identical. Your social customer relationships are shaped by the unique product, services and approach that you offer.

When working out what your Social Engagement Hub looks like, the most important things to consider are:

What is the Social Engagement Hub?The people, processes and tools for customer engagement through social channels.

01 Customer demand

02 Business-wide objectives for customer engagement

03 The internal resources you have available

Here we look at how you can best work collaboratively and organize resources to develop a first-class Social Customer Service operation that delivers value for your business.

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Assessing Your Need: Customer Expectations and Behavior

Consumers are not only starting to favor social over traditional service channels, but they’re now also able to communicate an entirely new, often time-sensitive, set of issues.

Whereas in the past a customer would have been unlikely to email you regarding the length of your checkout lines, a quick Tweet made in-store will make this a very public problem. There could be huge value for you to reply and fix the problem – but only if you do this before they leave the store.

These type of issues offer you a powerful opportunity to delight a customer in real-time.

Discovery: what do your customers say?

Urgent

Dissatisfaction

Technical

Sensitive

FAQ

Positive

Feedback

Understanding customer issues 01

in-store, mid-purchase...

unhappy customer, exposure of bad experience...

an account-specific issue, a problem that requires investigation, issues for a specialist team...

a PR crisis, questions on corporate policy, brand defamations...

simple questions that have an online resource

sharing positive experience, general love...

on campaigns, on products and services, not looking for answers

A simple way to understand the issues your customers are bringing over social media is to review and categorize one week’s tweets and comments.

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12

Understanding expectations for speed 02

Social networks exist to connect individuals via instantaneous communication channels. Speed is at the heart of social interaction.

For businesses, these time considerations are even more important. In creating a social brand presence, you have opened an extremely quick and convenient channel where customers can reach out for help.

But just how quick you need to be depends on how active your customer base is on social, as well as on the types of issue they’re bringing to you over social channels.

Source:

http://initi8marketing.co.uk/power-to-the-people-infographic/

Average response times demanded

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Understanding volume 03

Your ability to meet tight service levels depends on the volume of messages you receive at any particular time, and the resources you have in place. If you receive 10 customer service messages per hour, it’s quite likely that one dedicated Social Customer Service agent can meet this demand. If you receive hundreds of messages each hour, you will only be able achieve the response times customers expect by having a bigger team in place to process these interactions.

While you can only discover exactly how quickly your agents will be able to handle social messages by building up your team, leading companies have found that fully trained agents can handle 4-8 times the number of messages on social media as they can over the phone.

Go Daddy’s highly trained agents handle over 200 tweets per week, handling customers’ detailed technical issues. Our research has found that across all social platforms and industries, it’s possible for agents to deal with anything in the range from 500-2000 social messages in a month.

Understanding engagement times 04

The public nature of Conversocial, combined with high expectations, means that the times at which consumers get in touch are far more important than for private channels.

There can be a huge variance in both the times of day and days of the week that consumers prefer to engage with companies in different industries. If your customers are most active during evenings and the weekend, but your team is only available on weekdays from 9-5, you could be missing the majority of customer complaints while they have the greatest audience.

Build your staffing plans around these habits, and don’t presume they fall in line with your traditional call center patterns.

Conversocial automates the process of comprehensively calculating message volumes and times, tracking how each of these changes over time. This combined with advanced data categorization gives the complete picture of customer demand, allowing you to plan resourcing effectively.

How Conversocial Helps

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What Does A Social Engagement Hub Look Like?How Do You Connect With Your Customers ?

Your customers are reaching out to you on public social channels, with a brand new set of problems and questions. A contact centre doesn't cut it anymore, and your marketing department doesn't have the information your customers need. For your brand to deliver a human experience, that has the answers, a fully connected Social Engagement Hub is the only way to connect with your customers on their terms.

Marketing

Insight

?

Deliver a fully connectedcustomer experience

Communications

Social Customer Service

?

Social Network Conversations

Management

i

Identify customer conversations that need a response

Deliver excellentcustomer service in real-time

Fix customers’ problems at the heart

Exceed customer expectations and build stronger relationships

02

01 03

04

?Question

Rant

Suggestion

Praise

?Question

Rant

Suggestion

Praise

02

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As customer service becomes the most important area of social engagement, more and more companies are creating dedicated social care teams that are responsible for processing all incoming messages, engaging with customers, dealing with issues, and escalating the minority that require input from elsewhere in the business. Giving customer service a voice on social means you can leverage these channels as a real-time information tool for customers, making sure they have the most up to date details on service. To best meet customer demand with the level of resources you have, consider where these agents can come from internally, who you might need to hire afresh, and where outsourcing can help you scale.

Customer Service

Certain customer messages can’t be dealt with by your agents single-handedly. Revisiting your common issues, who needs to support your engagement team with further instruction and information to respond to atypical conversations? Service managers may be required to sign off a certain number of conversations each day, or to approve trainee agents’ public messages. Communications Managers may need to become more active in providing approved responses when a crisis hits.

Brand Protection

Quality customer engagement and a high level of service is one of the best ways to ensure marketing effectiveness - customer service and marketing need to be closely aligned on messaging, engagement and sales to create one consistent brand presence. The company voice should be unified, so working together to ensure you avoid a split social personality is crucial.

Marketing Effectiveness

Who’s interested in customer service performance across the business, and who requires insight from the vast amount of data unearthed in social conversations? Setting up a direct chain between Social Customer Service and product or customer insight teams is one of the fastest ways to pick up on supply chain issues, customer opinion or campaign effectiveness.

Insight and Reporting

It helps if Social Customer Service teams work

closely with content and knowledge base

management teams, or be involved directly in

content creation. By tracking frequently asked

questions, new product questions, and common

customer pain points, teams can identify where

gaps exist in the content.

- Michelle Kostya, Senior Manager of Social Media

Enablement at Rogers Communications

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Have you got everything covered?

Delivering social customer service is more

than just being reactive and solving customers

issues quickly and efficiently. While this is

certainly important, an opportunity exists for

brands to create real-time content proactively

based on current customer pain points. Not only

does this fill the content gap, but it also drives

search engine visibility and at the same time,

decreases calls into the call center.

- Michael Brito, VP Social Business Strategy, Edelman

Digital.

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Level two: Building a Social Customer Service Machine

Section 03

17

Social Customer Service Processes

Filtering through social data is a major challenge for any brand receiving even a moderate volume of customer interactions. Unlike private one-to-one service channels, social engagement channels are hugely diverse. A study of retailers using Conversocial found that only around 50% of social media messages merited an agent’s attention, and only 10% of these required a response. But this demand to noise ratio varies across brands and industries, with service providers often seeing much higher volumes of actionable conversations in the range of 50-80%.* It’s important to define criteria for what your team should be giving their attention to first. What’s high priority? What should be always guaranteed to get a response?

Every company is different, but here’s a framework for identifying what counts:

First-tier priority• A customer asking you a direct question• A customer expressing dissatisfaction• Customers that have an urgent product/service need• Escalating potential crisis issues

Second-tier priority• General references of your products and services• Positive experiences of your products and services• Indirect references that are relevant to your industry

Prioritization 01

* Conversocial customer data

We’ve designed a Priority Response Engine to identify interactions that need a response. We combine a number of intelligent technologies, including historic interaction analysis and machine learning to detect whether a message is a question, or something you’d usually respond to. This priority engine is also applied to advanced Boolean searching of Twitter, so that you can identify customers raising important issues and those who are in need of help and assistance to target them before it’s too late – even if they’re not reaching out directly.


Developing a Social Customer Service program has a number of unique requirements that aren’t encountered in a traditional customer service setting.

03

18

Social Customer Service is all about being where your customers are in order to deliver a great experience.

Resolution 02

Like any other channel, when customers come to you on social media they want to carry on their existing conversations with you, not start afresh. This is a major challenge in a mult-channel customer service world, but get it right and you can offer a much better customer experience.

Firstly, make sure that your team has full visibility of your customers’ social history. Are you already in the middle of a conversation? Have you had similar conversations in the past? Has the customer previously had a positive or negative relationship with your brand? Which agent has dealt with them before? This is all important information that your team should be equipped with before they wade into a conversation. Secondly, as fully integrated into the customer service environment, your team should have complete access to CRM data and other systems that hold information on customer records from other channels. A record of interactions across systems is the most important step towards a single view of the customer.

Know who you’re talking toConsumers know that social media offers a different customer experience to the channels they’ve been used to previously. They’ve chosen to speak with you there as it’s convenient and human, and they have potentially exhausted – and lost confidence in – other channels.

Offering resolution over social media is important for brand and consumer. The consumer gets the kind of interaction they were looking for, and the brand can display publicly how they handled the matter positively. What’s more, if you resolve on social, any thanks the customer gives will be public too. Anxiousness about dealing with sensitive customer information publicly can usually be resolved by making use of Facebook and Twitters’ private messaging functionality. This protects brand and customer while avoiding redirection and a manipulated experience. If it becomes necessary to take the issue to another channel, you’ve earned your customer’s respect and trust by keeping it on social for as long as possible.

Redirection isn’t good customer service

Social Customer Service has a benefit often overlooked by brands – especially the brands that force

their customers to Direct or Private messages when they offer support – it can create an archive of

answers that is searchable and open up the possibility to help more customers than the original poster.

Social Customer Service teams, whether on Twitter, blogs or community forums should consider if their

response has the potential to help other people that may be looking for the same answer. When the

response will, and it doesn’t include private customer information the agent could make the response

public. Not only may it help others, but it will let the community know that the question has been

answered!

- Michelle Kostya, Senior Manager of Social Enablement, Roger Communications

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For sensitive or detailed customer issues that require escalation to another team member, it’s important to have clear processes in place so that your agents can easily handle incoming messages without confusion or delay.

Escalation 03

01Clear guidelines explaining which messages agents can respond to.

Develop an escalation map that provides:

02A comprehensive breakdown of the types of messages frontline agents can’t immediately respond to, and the team responsible for each type.

03A quick method of escalating messages, along with the full case history and context, to the relevant team.

01Look at the messages you receive on your social channels, and pick out some real-life examples of messages that do and don’t need a response, to share with your team.

Tips for effective escalation

02Make the first level of escalation the agent’s team leader, who can determine whether any ambiguous customer messages should be escalated further, and track the ongoing performance of their agents.

03Again, look at your customer messages, and pick out some real examples of brand-related tweets/posts that should be passed to communications. Identify criteria for your supervisors and make sure they are well connected into the PR or marketing team, and potentially to experts in other areas of the business.

04Make your escalation map a live document. For extremely sensitive issues, your front line agents should be equipped with a continually updated list of topics that will need PR approval when formulating a response.

Conversocial allows for quick and easy assignment across team members, with private internal notes to support knowledge sharing while keeping the Social Customer Service team at the helm of customer engagement. An approval workflow can help protect against inappropriate messages going public before agents are ready.


Start

Access themessage

Evaluate thepurpose

UnhappyCustomer?

Are the factscorrect?

Are the factscorrect?

DedicatedComplainer?

ComedianWant-to-be?

Do you needto respond?

NegativePositive

No Response

Can youadd value?

No

Yes

Respond in kindand share

Thank theperson

No

No

No

No No

Can you addressthe issue?

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

YesYesYes

Escalate

Explain what isbeing done to

correct the issue

Gently correctthe facts

Does customerneed/deserve

more info?

Take reasonableaction to resolve

issue and letcustomer know

action taken

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Social media provides an early warning system for new business issues, from campaigns and product launches to serious reputational problems. It’s also the fastest medium for corporate crises to spread, with a high risk of brand damage.

For these reasons it’s critical to have a clearly defined social crisis response plan in place. Ensure your PR team can pick up on potentially damaging issues as quickly as possible, work with management on the official response if needed, then collaborate effectively with your frontline social agents on getting that message to customers.

Your social care team can provide a greater communication reach over platforms such as Facebook and Twitter than the PR team can achieve via traditional media. Social has proven to be a very effective channel to distribute an official reaction to issues affecting your customers.

Crisis response plan 04

01Create a holding message as quickly as possible when a potential social crisis emerges - consumers look for a very quick reaction to issues over social media.

Tips for effective crisis protection

02When a social media issue escalates, draft responses to different types of customer message for the customer care team, to show responsiveness and avoid appearing evasive.

03Establish clear criteria for when a message has to be escalated to PR team (based on content and number of comments/likes/shares).

04Create a schedule outlining who exactly will be responsible for dealing with these escalated messages at any given time, so that nothing can be dropped through the cracks.

Conversocial is designed to keep you up to date, in real-time, of changes in your social communication. A management dashboard informing you to the minute of any changes in volume and possible problems associated with a spike, ensures that the entire business can collaborate in coordinating a timely response.


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Setting up a Social Customer Service team presents new requirements that probably aren’t quite met by your existing teams. These agents need to have strong customer service skills combined with competency in a public facing role. On social, your agents are your brand ambassadors.

In a recent report addressing resource planning for customer service organizations, Gartner recommended that “Consumer-facing customer service organizations are advised to segment the agent pool into a separate social media team, and to share the learning that comes from the smaller teams.” *

Based on experience working with major enterprises to set up their Social Customer Service operations we echo that recommendation. Forming a specialized Social Customer Service team within your existing customer service organization maximizes impact. These teams have specific skillsets that can be provided to HR in the hunt for the perfect recruit.

Strong written communication skills

What to look for:

Training Your Team on Social Customer Service ProcessWho to hire?

Good customer service case history

Motivated by improving customer relations

Good judgment

Use of social channels in personal communication or an interest in learning

Hiring new dedicated Social Customer Service representatives

You can look for the skills you need and for experience in social.+You can look for a history in customer service and ensure they’re customer-engagement focused.

+

They still need training in your existing systems.-

They may be hard to come by!-

Recruiting from your existing customer service team

They’re fully accustomed to your call center knowledge base and customer service processes.

+

They need training in public communication, brand guidelines and social tone.-

Training your social team in customer service

They’re already competent and confident in conversing with customers socially.+They aren’t trained in your existing customer service processes and knowledge bases.-They aren’t trained in customer service and may not have the skills required to deal with customers in this way.

-

As you scale, this may prove to be a much more expensive staffing option. -

* “The Social CRM Resource Planning Guide for Customer Service Organizations” August 2012

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Before your agents start posting and tweeting live on your branded accounts, it’s important to deliver training and set up the right security processes.

Turning Social Customer Service hires into a Social Customer Service workforce

Training:

Confidence-building The move from customer service representative to brand ambassador is a significant psychological shift. Rather than focusing on how prepared you are to hand over control, you should instill your agents with the conviction to engage on behalf of their employer.

Brand understanding Customer Service, along with many other departments, is often only privy to brand messages in the lightest of ways – HR’s brand values won’t cut it for these roles. You need to share the brand impression you’re trying to create externally.

Work on real customer issues Handling real customer comments and tweets is the best way for your agents to become familiarized with what they’ll be managing on a daily basis, and understand how to react publicly.

Resources to handle diverse issuesIf you’re starting off small, you likely won’t have a completely segmented social division based on specialization. Your team should at least know how to find information for the lion’s share of customer inquiries, either through a knowledge base or via efficient internal communication.

Establish how you’re going to track development An approval process can be the best way to get agents handling real issues, while giving the freedom to ‘practice’ without risk. Tracking approval rates and reasons for rejection can help you identify how your agents can improve to manage social communication autonomously.

How Hertz does it:At Hertz, we began with a selection of

internationally based customer service

representatives from the very start of our

program. We wanted to let our customers around

the world know that social media was a reliable

customer service channel. In communications

and marketing, we trained customer service

agents on handling customer communication

publicly through WebEx sessions and live training

sessions using real customer issues in order to

acclimate agents to these new channels before

going live.

We have gradually shifted front-line

communication from marketing to

customer service over a period of several

months to ensure the transition into the contact

center would be seamless and would not

harm our brand’s reputation or our customer

relationships. By developing good working

relationships with Customer Service, we know

we’ve got a sustainable model to offer customers

the best possible experience.

- Lemore Hecht, Communications and Social Media

Manager, Hertz

“

“

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When you’ve determined how you want your Social Engagement Hub to work, with repeatable Social Customer Service processes, a good way to keep consistency across your teams is to formalize these guidelines into a playbook.

Your playbook should form a go-to resource for your agents, both trained and newly hired. Gartner also recommends “Use the marketing department’s experience with social media to more rapidly gain competency, learn best practices and obtain access to their technology”* Bringing in the marketing department to communicate branding guidelines in an evergreen resource is the best way to transfer social engagement to customer care.

Why are you using social media and what are the company goals?

To respond to customers within a certain time? To make sure responses are completely accurate? It’s important to give your agents a strong focus when handling social communication. They need to be trusted with more flexibility to manage an ever-changing channel with limited time to act, but that doesn’t mean you can’t provide guidance. Key motivators and priorities will help empower your team to make the best judgment while delivering fast service to your customers.

Checklist:

Creating a Social Customer Service playbook:

Introduction to social platforms

If you’re bringing in agents from the contact center, although social media skills are desirable, it’s best to include the details of how the different platforms you’re using work, and how conversations can be seen publicly in different scenarios for those who are less familiar.

Tone of voice

Descriptions of the brand personality you’d like agents to convey through their engagement with customers can form a good guiding principle.

Do’s and Don’ts for engagement

Being explicit with examples of what responses would and would not be a brand fit is a good way to demonstrate brand and tone guidelines and avoid misinterpretation.

Example responses

Providing example responses to common customer issues can help your team to understand how to craft their own. It’s important that agents use these as a guide in conjunction with tone guidelines, rather than templates to be copied directly.

A list of resources to find support information

Evergreen content and peer-to-peer community is invaluable when it comes to scaling your social customer care team’s efforts. Your agents’ go-to resources could include anything from knowledge-base articles and how-to videos to solutions posted to a branded community. Linking to this existing content can help your team to shorten response times and remain relevant.

Processes agents should be following

Document your response, escalation and crisis processes as tackled already in this guide so that they are accessible by every agent. Explain clearly the steps for processing a customer message, including how to respond, what data to record such as sentiment and categories, and when to archive away.

Contact details for everyone relevant

Make sure that your playbook has a complete directory of everyone to address for different customer needs or social situations.


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How are you going to project your brand image through many voices?

If you have more than one person responding to queries decide whether you want a unified tone of voice. i.e are you happy for each agent to have their own identity or do you want the customer journey to always be the same?

Have you thought about...?Best practice planning from Rebecca Doyle, Assistant CRM Manager, ODEON Cinemas

Think about how you’d react to different phrasing.

Try not to use the same stock response for answering queries. Have a guideline to the right answer but know when being a robot will exacerbate the situation.

For examples, the difference between “Thank you for getting in touch, could you please contact our customer services team onxxxx” and “Hi xxx, Thanks for taking the time to get in touch. Our Customer Services team will be able to help you further, would you mind giving them a call on xxxxx” can be a real game-changer.

Are you managing your customers’ expectations?

Make sure customers know you always care, even if you can’t always be listening. Not everyone can be there 24/7 to answer customers’ queries. If you’re not around at the weekend, or late into the evening, perhaps write a post and pin it to the top of your Facebook timeline with an alternative means to contact you.

Know when to be proactive and reactive.

If your company is making a difficult change such as a price increase, which you know will get a lot of attention via social media, consider the best way to react. Will it be better to let everyone know and contain the anger on to one post, where you own the conversation? Or is it better to be reactive and wait for people to simmer down? Sometimes, your actions can add fuel to the fire.

Be structured.

When a crisis does erupt you don’t have much time to react, and holes in your system will really slow you down while your team flounders. Get a clear team structure in place to ensure that someone can take control of coordinating a reaction, and make sure that if someone in your escalation chain is unavailable you’ve marked out someone else to turn to. Have a selection of PR-approved messages ready for agents that go above and beyond their normal responses.

Think of every possible scenario with your crisis escalation procedure.

It’s important that this is watertight. What happens if something goes viral over a period where no-one’s working e.g. evenings and weekends? There’s no point in creating plans and documentation that quickly become useless when you’re not there to execute.

Have you actually defined what a crisis is?

Does your CEO spotting a negative comment with a few likes constitute a crisis, or is it when a post has over 200 likes in a 2 hour period? Agents can’t begin to follow your crisis procedure if they aren’t sure quite when to jump into crisis mode. There are many different criteria for what’s important on social media, but using codes can help you execute a consistent policy. At ODEON we use colours to define different levels, e.g green = normal and red = PR crisis

Staying in control of social crises:

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The goal of proactive customer service is to engage with customers at their point of need, before they come to you. This means looking for customers who are sharing their problems, questions and feedback publicly without mentioning you directly, and sharing information on service issues through social updates before customers need to ask you for it.

Proactive Social Customer Service

What is it?

Why go the extra mile?We researched consumers’ behavior on Twitter and their attachment to the ‘@’ is far from close. Only 3% of tweets referencing America’s largest retailers carry the @symbol. Over 1/3 of all these indirect tweets were customer service related, with 8% of those expressing dissatisfaction. With the volume of Twitter conversations growing every day, this 8% becomes a significant number of publicly unhappy customers. A purely reactive social customer engagement strategy misses a huge opportunity to create positive experiences and prevent issues from escalating. Forrester’s Top 15 trends for 2013, found that “Customers Expect Proactive Outbound Communication”. But according to the latest Forrsights Networks and Telecommunications Survey, only 29% of enterprises are currently investing in proactive outbound communications. While this trend takes hold, companies have a great opportunity to surprise and delight.

inactive

reactive

proactive

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Looking for business opportunities on a noisy platform like Twitter isn’t as straightforward as ‘who’s talking about me?’ Around 60% could be noise that’s unlikely to need any kind of response or action, and different opportunities need to be handled in specific ways. Here are some examples of conversations your Social Customer Service team should be looking to engage in.

How can you do it?

BrandGauge the public mood and reach out to be part of the dialogue surrounding your name.

ProductFind out what customers are saying about specific products, feed them the information they need or ask for elaboration, and gain insight for future developments.

ServiceTake the opportunity to compensate for customer dissatisfaction with great service online, and learn where there’s room for improvement in the customer experience.

IndustryWatch all events and issues that affect your industry. Being the first to step in with an appropriate comment can give you a major competitive advantage.

ExecutiveWhat’s being said about your senior executives is key to brand reputation on social. It’s important to be ready for the right response to a developing issue.

Competitors

Conversational Dynamics

Looking for appropriate engagement opportunities in conversations about you and your competitors can add real sales value.

Finding and assisting customers without them referencing your brand or products is as proactive as it gets. These customers may be in need of information, and if approached sensitively you have the chance to be first in their minds.

Go Daddy strives to give customers a positive experience of the brand, no matter how unhappy they might be. This involves setting up complex queries and workgroups to target different conversations most effectively, from technical issues to product issues to customer love.

What the experts say:Any time you can exceed a customer’s

expectation in terms of service, you have created

an opportunity. In fact, you likely now have a much

stronger customer relationship than you would

have had if the problem had never existed in the

first place. Most things break. If you’re proactive in

setting a positive precedent, your customer now

knows what to expect when they do.

- Craig M. Jamieson, Social Business Trainer and

Consultant, Adaptive Business Services

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“

How Go Daddy does it:

Broken expectations yield strong reactions.

And that applies to pleasant surprises, not just

negative ones. We believe that reaching out and

offering help to customers who don’t ask for it is

the truest form of service and an effective way to

create advocates online.

- Alon Waisman, Social Media Operations Manager,

Go Daddy

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Level Three: Measure, Refine and ScaleSection 04

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Level Three: Measure, Refine and Scale

One of Forrester’s Top 15 trends for 2013, is that ‘Customer Service is moving from cost center to differentiator’. “Customer service organizations are typically managed as a cost center. Key success metrics focus on productivity, efficiency, and regulatory compliance instead of customer satisfaction. However, we are seeing that customer service organizations are gradually adopting a balanced scorecard of metrics that include not only cost and compliance, but also customer satisfaction, and which are more suited to drive the right agent behavior and deliver better outcomes.” Gartner recently shared advice on the best approach to customer service measurement in The Social CRM Resource Planning Guide: Businesses need to try more innovative approaches to measurements that are less focused on traditional efficiency metrics, and more tied to concepts such as Net Promoter scores, lifetime customer value, changes in customer defection and churn rates among the demographic using social media, and brand sentiment.*

The customer service industry has long been focused on delivering service at the lowest possible expenditure: its role in the company is often seen as a necessary evil.

Beyond the trailblazers who are revolutionizing the position of customer service (such as Zappos) the challenges of delivering customer service through traditional channels have meant that for most businesses, the customer experience has been sacrificed to save costs. Talk time (or lack of) has been prioritized above customer satisfaction. A 2011 study shows progress in this direction, with the majority of call centers starting to get a balance between efficiency and experience, but there’s further to go.

What the experts say:Too many contact centers are trying to force

fit social customer service into the mold of a

traditional call center. Traditional metrics such

as handle times, first contact resolution and

time to close simply do not fit the proper way to

enable social customer service. This ‘round peg

square hole’ approach is the likely reason that

marketing is not quite ready to give up control (if

there is such a thing as control). It’s time to bring a

coordinated and collaborative approach to Social

Customer Service. As much as we would like to

fight the core service metrics, we need some of

them. As much as we do not want to build more

process and worry about efficiency, it is not all

bad. The whole enterprise is in this together. Only

when this is realized will real progress be made.

- Mitch Lieberman, Customer Experience Architect and

Strategist, Managing Partner, DRI

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“

Somewhat successful42.7%

Somewhat un-successful11.1%

Not successful at all1.1%

We don’t have a way tomeasure success

5.8%

Extremely successful8.8%Successful

29.9%

How successful has/have your center(s) been at achieving the balance between call center e�ciency and customer experience?


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Quality Measures – what are you doing for your customers?

Fast responses are important on social media. It’s important to reduce the exposure of unanswered customer issues, but customers also expect a much quicker reaction. Track whether agents are acknowledging customers issues within your agreed Service Levels, which should be faster than channels such as email and phone.

Responsiveness

To understand whether your program is delivering, Social Customer Service metrics should look at what’s achieved for the customer.

How many customers are you touching proactively? Growing the numbers of messages sent proactively to customers mentioning your brand is a good measurement for how effectively you’re building awareness of your Social Customer Service team, and creating positive experiences.

Customers reached proactively

Keep redirect rates to a minimum. Track when an issue has been taken to another channel rather than to private message and make sure this happens only when absolutely necessary. Tracking public resolutions as a target means meeting customer expectations and developing a permanent resource of content for customers looking for answers.

Real resolutionCustomer sentiment is important to track for a number of reasons, but measuring how frequently your agents convert a conversation from a negative interaction to a positive one can show how effectively your team is aiding customer satisfaction.

If you’re not always meeting Service Levels, can you spot a bottleneck? Even if you don’t go 24/7 with service, it may be that extending business hours into an evening shift could help tackle nighttime backlogs for your agents in the morning, improving responsiveness and customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction

Track these quality measures against each agent to understand where training is needed. If you’re using an approval workflow, review reasons for rejection. Is it spelling and grammar? Is it tone of voice?

How are your agents performing?

•

•

How could you deliver even better service?

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When looking at organic social conversations, the sentiment of customers’ messages is a good way to understand changes in customer satisfaction. Customers that are happy with the level of service provided, and have had positive engagements with your brand, are likely to spend significantly more.

Customer Loyalty

Effectiveness Measures – what’s the impact?

Tracking sentiment across all public messages is a great way to understand the image projected of your brand. How many customers are promoting you on social? Opinions shared on social networks are net promoter in action, and negate the importance of inorganic surveys. Recording the sentiment of every customer message is the only way to measure this consistently and effectively. Provide your team with clear guidelines on how to categorize and track this.

E.g. “If a friend saw this comment, would it improve, worsen, or not affect their perception of the company?”

Social NPS

Sales

Leading UK telecoms provider BT demonstrates how a fully connected Social Customer Service team can provide real business value, by facilitating an easy sales channel for company and customer. In delivering positive social engagement when faced with service issues, and empowering the same agents to handle sales enquiries across channels, BT leverages social communication to convert customer service efforts into real revenue.

How many cases are converted into sales? Logging interactions across CRM systems and tracking links shared by agents can give you insight into the conversion rate from service to sales.

How B.T. does it:

Aggregating the follower numbers of the customers you’re engaging with can give an indication of the potential audience of both your customers’ complaints and their positive follow-up messages, if they issue a public thank you.

Reach

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These channels offer readily available data on what your customers truly like and dislike about your company, offering you the chance to engage and make a difference.

Customer insight

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

Social media is becoming a barometer for what your customers are thinking.

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Making Changes from the Social Barometer

How others do it

Ensuring each customer receives a positive restaurant experience is one of the opportunities for McDonald’s customer engagement in social. The team has a large volume of conversation surrounding the McDonalds brand on Twitter, but proactively seeks feedback with a new @Reachout_McD twitter handle, which has had a great reception from customers. This engagement is rolled up into insight at the macro level, to identify opportunities: how fast, accurate, and friendly is the service?

Social feedback forms a part of the complete insight process including combining traditional feedback and is harnessed to execute changes at the restaurant level.

The real-time information available at your fingertips is a game-changer when it comes to improving the customer experience. Don’t just tell customers you’ve listened. Tell them you’ve listened and changed something.

McDonalds

Instead of constant fire-fighting, why not listen and fix the problem (or opportunity) at source. Build

firewalls instead of fighting fires

- Laurence Buchanan, Head of Digital Transformation and CRM propositions within Ernst & Young’s EMEIA Customer Centre

of Excellence

Conversocial allows you to tag and categorize your incoming social messages to make the process of organizing and analyzing customer feedback easy and efficient. Conversocial’s analytics make it possible to track trends over time, and to facilitate internal sharing of information. You can print and send reports to management, or export data to other systems for analysis.


Nokia CareOur Social Care presence is a key enabler of the

mission of Care to support our customers in the

channels that they are engaged in and seeking

solutions. It facilitates the continual enhancement

of our products by providing real time visibility to

emergent Care issues and organizationally it has

helped to bring down the barriers between the

social consumer and key internal stakeholders.

With our Product Quality experts being directly

engaged, we have been able to reduce the turn-

around-time for issue identification by weeks,

thereby improving Care responsiveness and

customer satisfaction.

- Sean Valderas, Care Social Media Manager for Nokia’s

America region

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For this leading UK train provider, Twitter offers a chance to change all the small things about their service, to make a real difference to the experience of as many individuals as possible.

The vast majority of constructive feedback raised on Twitter is passed back to management teams, and if a positive change can be made as a result of that, it will happen. If a customer on a First Great Western Train tweets that something is broken, this will be fed in real-time to an engineer, who will make sure it’s looked at as part of the maintenance schedule. Twitter enables a completely new kind of service.

First Great Western

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How do I show ROI?

According to Gallup, customers who are fully engaged represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer. Yet, on average, only 20% of customers are fully engaged.*

As Social Customer Service becomes established and operations start to scale, justifying the business value and return on investment in staff, tools and training becomes more and more important.

Here, we address 4 key areas of the business case for Social Customer Service:

*Blue Wolf, The Essential Guide to Customer Obsession

Protected revenue and customer retention 01

The most significant justification for pursuing high-quality Social Customer Service is the value this brings to customer relationships. Customers who engage over social have an expectation for a certain level of service, and every time you fail to meet this, their continued revenue stream is at risk.

Unique Customers HelpedAnnual Customer Value

Exposed Revenue Protected

x

=

Supporting customer retention, through the customers you serve and the others who see it, is the most compelling reason to pursue an efficient Social Customer Service program.

Cost Savings: call deflection and productivity 02

Encouraging your customers to choose social media as a preferred channel can reduce the cost to serve. Our experience, together with that of Independent analysts suggest that agents can

manage 4-8 times as many contacts over social channels as over the phone. This provides real value, before you consider the potential for public service to reduce the creation of new issues – with resolutions and answers available for all customers to see.

Sales & Marketing effectiveness 03

Many businesses plough huge marketing budgets into social campaigns, but fail to acknowledge the value good service and engagement brings to those investments, and the damage that negative comments can do to marketing updates. Our customers have increased engagement by over 30% since developing good social customer care practices, offering high quality interactions that support positive word of mouth, and ultimately sales. And new, hybrid Social Customer Service agents aren’t just handling post-sales, they’re creating new ones.

Lean Savings 04

Social Customer Service serves as an instant barometer for customer opinion, and a window into the issues affecting your business. Identifying bottlenecks, disruptions, faults and other problems as they develop provides actionable insight into how to tighten up your supply chain, and stop wasting revenue.

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

How B.T. does it:

What the experts say:The real question in my mind is not whether ROI is measurable or valid (it is), it’s whether ROI is the

only metric worth evaluating? Don Peppers and Martha Rogers take strategic thinking about customer-

investments one step further with their comprehensive work on Return on Customer (ROC)

Return on investment quantifies how well a firm creates value from a given investment. But what

quantifies how well a company creates value from its customers? For this you need the metric of Return

on Customer (ROC). The ROC equation has the same form as an ROI equation. ROC equals a firm’s

current-period cash flow from its customers plus any changes in the underlying customer equity, divided

by the total customer equity at the beginning of the period.”

What I like most about ROC is that it treats customers as an asset (the sum of all customer lifetime

value)… A decision to invest in social CRM needs to be aligned to an organisation’s corporate objectives

and needs to consider both short and long terms value drivers.

- Laurence Buchanan, Head of Digital Transformation and CRM propositions within Ernst & Young’s EMEIA Customer Centre

of Excellence

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Afterthought: The futureof Social Customer Service

The Social Engagement Hub is about the deep integration of Social Customer

Service with the rest of your business. Customer Service Directors need to view

their Social Customer Care teams not as an off-shoot, but as a fundamental part

of how they deliver a good customer experience. To achieve this, it’s important

that they seek to integrate Social Customer Service solutions with the rest of their

systems to ensure they have a real, single view of the customer across different

channels. And with Social Customer Service fast forming the cornerstone of all

social engagement, it’s essential that the vast knowledge being generated in

real time is not siloed, but is fed directly into the rest of the business - senior

management, R&D, Marketing and Communications.

Without the right resources, commitment and leadership in place, this cross-

departmental undertaking will fail - risking your customer relationships and

leaving your brand open to a serious crisis. But if done correctly, you will increase

your customer value and customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and improve your

business processes. You now have an opportunity to engage positively with your

customers on a larger scale than ever before. Are you seizing it?

In this guide, we’ve outlined a model for how you can support your entire organization, and your customer experience, through Social Customer Service. But today this is only being practiced by the most innovative of businesses. The future of Social Customer Service is in its recognition as a business-critical function, and a new understanding of customer engagement.

- Joshua March, CEO Conversocial

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To carry on the conversation with us on best practice Social Customer Service, tweet us @conversocial, or join the discussion on our blog at www.conversocial.com/blog

If you’d like to find out more about how Conversocial can help you develop an effective social customer service program, get in touch with us at [email protected]

Powering Social Customer Service

@[email protected]

The definitive guide to Social Customer Service (2nd edition)

Business

Transcript of The definitive guide to Social Customer Service (2nd edition)