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The Three Challenges for
Social Customer Service

Social Customer Service

Social Customer Service in my opinion is something a company MUST be prepared to do if they intend to also participate in social channels to market their products and services. If a brand launches a Facebook page, Twitter handle or sets out to conquer any other platform for marketing purposes they will get customer queries, and support questions. Smart brands have found ways to support these customers on these channels.

A few years ago when I was working on launching BlackBerry’s Social Customer Service program I was looking for examples and the most commonly referred to were Dell and Comcast. Just a few years later a quick search and you will find many more success stories including; Xbox (which recently became the first brand to reach 1 million tweets), Zappos, JetBlue, Starbucks, Best Buy and AT&T. Yet, a quick look at some stats, show how that while customers expect to receive responses to their complaints and questions, many companies are just leaving them waiting.

Social Customer Service is challenging. It is a large shift for many customer service departments who have often been running in the same manner, with the same tools, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and processes for 50 years. Taking what was always 1:1 to a very public model is scary and daunting. There are plenty of reasons why companies have failed to adopt social customer service. To triumph in social customer service you will need to be prepared to tackle three challenges: 1) Maintaining stakeholder support, 2) Accepted success measures, and 3) Scalability

Maintaining Stakeholder Support

If you are building out a customer service team for social media you will need not only initial support but ongoing support from your executives and partner departments. Social media customer service relies on teamwork with product, marketing, issue management and other teams. These relationships are crucial to ensuring customer feedback, complaints and concerns are dealt with in a timely and effective manner.

Understanding the needs of your partners, and stakeholders will help your social customer team provide value to the business. Which teams want to know when issues are bubbling up? How do they want to receive customer feedback? By providing continuous value with your partners and stakeholders you will maintain their support which will result in resources, budget and backing when you need it. You will need to create a sustainable practice of communication with your executives, your partners and team. Share success, challenges and roadmap through roadshows, reports, and regular meetings.

Accepted Success Measures

When you first launch a social media customer service team you will probably get away with saying “Look how many followers we are getting!” and “Isn’t this great what feedback we are getting from our customers?” This will suffice for your executives for only a short time. Eventually they will want your team to be measured against KPIs. A traditional call center would measure teams and individuals against a variety of KPIs all of which would be tracked on a scorecard. KPIs could include: Time to Response, First Call Resolution, CSAT, Average Handle Time, Average Hold Time, Quality Assurance and the total quantity of interactions.

By creating a score card for your team before your organization asks for it will allow you to show success and your continued progress. When possible find ways to include KPIs your customer service department is familiar with and uses. Some tools in the market will help you manage a number KPIs, but some KPIs such as “Average Handle Time” won’t make a lot of sense in the social space where a customer tweets to you and then walks away from twitter for a coffee break and in reality those aren’t terribly good KPIs to drive a positive customer experience. Instead look at CSAT, Time to Response, and Resolution. Consider working with your Quality Assurance team and developing a QA program that works for your social customer service reps.

Scalability

As you first build out the team you will have the newness and excitement on your side. You might be lucky and build a good sized team in a short period of time. If you measure success and performance you might have fewer challenges in building out a team to manage the influx of customer questions and complaints. But the organization won’t likely keep throwing resources against your team so you will need to find other ways to scale in the long-term.

We hear a lot about the inability to scale social customer service. However, I suspect similar conversations happened when companies started answering the telephone. How will we ever have enough people to answer the phone every time a customer wants to talk to us? Yet, social customer service has one added benefit….it can create an archive of answers that is searchable and when we help one customer we have the potential the help ten, a hundred or a thousand. When responding in social channels keep this in mind, and use the conversations with customers to drive content creation for your self-service options (forum posts, blogs, knowledge base and how-to videos). In addition use the conversations to fix what is broken. If you regularly get questions about a feature…maybe it isn’t as intuitive as you think it is!

The right tools can help you manage your engagement, success and content. Finally setting expectations with both customers and internal partners is crucial- what are your hours of operation? What questions will and can you answer? How quickly can they expect a response? Certainly the need for Social Customer Service will grow and the team will need to revise process, expectations and find additional ways to meet the customers needs. Finally never underestimate your army of employees or advocates!

While there are challenges to adopting social customer service there are businesses that have risen to the challenge to help their customers on social channels.

Source: Social Business News

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Customer Support Can’t Keep Up
With Rise of Social Media

Companies are expanding their social media and mobile presence at a rate that far exceeds their customer support abilities, according to a report by Constellation Group.

As a result, contact centres face a “coverage gap”, according to the report’s author, Constellation contributing analyst Elizabeth Herrell.

“Many companies have social media presence on sites such as Twitter and Facebook and create mobile applications but have not set up the infrastructure to deliver the same level of customer support as their more traditional communication channels,” wrote Herrell.

The report noted a “huge rise” in the number of customers who now use social networking sites and mobile commerce for business transactions, and said customer service in those areas was often isolated and not keeping pace.”Without integrated customer service support for social media and mobile commerce, customers will grow frustrated with their social communication experiences,” Herrell stated.

“It is important for companies to fully embrace these newer channels by taking the lead in not only addressing the marketing aspects, but also in developing integrated support to ensure customers receive consistent treatment and quality problem-resolution over their social media and m-commerce communication channels.”Customer support teams were “scrambling” to adjust to requests from social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, and from mobile commerce applications, Herrell wrote. However, properly capitalising on these channels created “powerful” opportunities for businesses, considering Facebook’s 600 million and Twitter’s 200 million users.

“Failure to do so will result in customer fallout as social sites’ community of interests can spread negative comments quickly,” she wrote. “Conversely, companies that proactively support their customers’ use of social and mobile apps often find they generate higher customer loyalty and brand awareness.”

Companies that expanded their social networking and mobile interaction could increase customer engagement, monitor feedback, generate sales, cut advertising costs and offer location based services, she wrote.

Herrell advised companies to better monitor competitors’ social networking and mobile tactics, and to make customer engagement a priority.

Source: PC World

Overactive Customer Service via Social Media

Realizing the importance of customer service for growing their business and enhancing customer experience, many brands are adopting social media platforms for addressing queries. Twitter and Facebook are on the top of the list of businesses for connecting with customers speedily. Brands like Vodafone India (@VodafoneIn), Airtel (@Airtel_in), Tata Photon Plus (@TataPhotonPlus), LG India (@LGIndiaTweets) are aggressively attending to issues and resolving grievances through this platform and their efforts are certainly respected.
While this is a much appreciated attempt that businesses are making, some of them are clearly getting it wrong. An adequate amount of research and observation is required before stepping into this platform. Also it is important to have a plan in place for every brand and its target audience. One important thing that they should keep in mind is to steer away from going overboard with these channels. Junk mail, spam posts and unrelated tweets; this is something that nobody will appreciate. Hiding posts and unfollowing brands is simply a click away for users and they wouldn’t reconsider the option if displeased and unconvinced.
After a thorough observation on a few big players, we noticed that Tata Photon Plus addressed a customer’s concern intolerably. The customer service executives called the customer over 8 times in one day after her tweet regarding their connectivity. The issue remained unresolved and moreover this became more of an annoyance for the customer. On the other hand, another active Twitter user complained to the same brand on Twitter itself and conversely his issue was unaddressed even after repeated notifications online as well as offline.
The question that arises here is that shouldn’t there be a balance maintained between the levels of intervention? Is there a specific criterion for deciding which queries must be tackled sooner than the others and which should be left unattended?

Twitter – A Phenomenal Customer Service Tool

A lot of brands nowadays are moving to social media channels for enhancing and improving their customer service. One of the major advantages of this medium is prompt, direct and instant response to customer queries, feedback and suggestions.

One of the leading players in the Indian telecom industry has recently started using Twitter as a channel to address and resolve user complaints. An effort worth appreciating, this service is doing fairly well from the customers’ perspectives. However, the loophole in their service is the fact that even though their customer helpline number is functional seven days a week, their Twitter account goes offline on weekends. So if a user has a query on a Saturday or Sunday, they only look into it on a Monday if approached via Twitter. It is kind of disconcerting to see a wonderful tool not being used to its fullest potential. Do you agree with the fact that this could be mended to offer better customer service?