A Quick Guide to Social Customer Service: Measure, Refine & Scale

A Quick Guide to Social Customer Service: Measure, Refine & Scale

Measuring how well your Social Customer Service program is working for both your customers and your business is not easy. For the last instalment of our Breakdown Quick Guides, we put together some recommendations and calculations to take you through Measuring, Refining and Scaling your operation so you can grow your Social Customer Service in a valuable way.

Level Three: Measure, Refine and Scale 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. How successful has/have your center(s) been at achieving the balance between call center efficiency and customer experience? 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. 29.9% Successful 8.8% Extremely successful 42.7% Somewhat successful 11.1% Somewhat un-successful 1.1% Not successful at all 5.8% We don t have a way to measure success What the experts say: 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.* 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 * The Social CRM Resource Planning Guide for Customer Service Organizations August 2012

Quality Measures what are you doing for your customers? To understand whether your program is delivering, Social Customer Service metrics should look at what s achieved for the customer. Responsiveness 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. Real resolution 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. Customers reached proactively 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. Customer satisfaction Customer 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. How are your agents performing? 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 could you deliver even better service? 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.

Effectiveness Measures what s the impact? Customer Loyalty 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. Social NPS 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? How B.T. does it: 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. 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? Reach 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 followup messages, if they issue a public thank you. Sales 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.

Customer insight Social media is becoming a barometer for what your customers are thinking. 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. What types of message are retailers receiving on Facebook and Twitter?

Making Changes from the Social Barometer 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 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. How others do it McDonalds 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. Nokia Care Our 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 turnaround-time for issue identification by weeks, thereby improving Care responsiveness and customer satisfaction. - Sean Valderas, Care Social Media Manager for Nokia s America region First Great Western 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. How Conversocial Helps 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.

How do I show ROI? 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. 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.* 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. Here, we address 4 key areas of the business case for Social Customer Service: 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. x Unique Customers Helped Annual Customer Value 03 Sales & Marketing effectiveness 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. = Exposed Revenue Protected 04 Lean Savings 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 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. 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 *Blue Wolf, The Essential Guide to Customer Obsession

How B.T. does it: 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. 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 customerinvestments 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

You can download the complete Definitive Guide to Social Customer Service at: www.conversocial.com/social-customer-service To find out more about how Conversocial can help you to deliver first-class Social Customer Service, get in touch with: sales@conversocial.com 10

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