Social Customer Service Webinar Hosts Answer Questions

21 Aug 2013

The recent Interactive Intelligence webinar (Delivering Social Customer Service - More than Just Having a Presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) was a resounding success, so much so that there wasn't enough time to cover all the questions the audience had asked. While everyone left the webinar feeling more educated about customer interaction, brand loyalty, and social media, there were some who still had burning questions left unanswered.

Fortunately, their questions did not fall on deaf ears. Any questions that were not answered during the webinar were still received, and the hosts were generous enough to provide answers on their own time. To give you an idea of what was asked, here are some of the questions and the responses that were sent by Interactive Intelligence to the individuals who posted the questions.

Question: How do you control competition-related bad publicity against your company?

Answer: This is an interesting question and I'm not sure which way you were going with this. So, here are two answers.

  1. Competitors are posting negative or bad publicity in social media about your brand(s).
  2. First of all, you can't control it. In the world of social media, anyone can take on any persona and start spreading bad comments. So, the real challenge is how you respond to it. Remember, their negative post/tweet came out first so, unless it is blatantly obvious it is a competitive attack, they're going to be seen as telling the truth. So, you need to handle it wisely. If the bad publicity is posted on your Facebook page, don't remove it. The public can perceive that as an admission to guilt - a way of covering it up. So, you need to respond to it tactfully and diplomatically. Be honest and positive in your response, providing supporting links to documents/web content that tell your side of the story. In addition, encourage your followers to counter the bad publicity with good publicity. If your followers are responding contrary to the negative publicity for you, that is far better than you doing it.
  3. Your company has some bad publicity (product recalls, poor customer service, revenue losses, etc.) and they've turned to social media to share it with the world.

Be sure you are using social media monitoring tools to monitor your brand activity to see what they're talking about. Without this tool, you'll never get the complete picture of what is being said about you. Once you get a good feel for what is being said, alter you social media content strategy so that you put forth positive messages that counter-act what the competitors are saying about you. But you need to be sure that the content you're putting out is factual and supportive of your counter message. If it isn't, the public will see right through it which will make it far worse.

Question: How do I get around my mass messaging from social media becoming repetitive and more customer service based?

Answer: A few thoughts on this one:

  1. Work with your marketing department to craft fresh new content that's built around an editorial calendar or content plan. This will help ensure that new content is coming out with the right messages at the right time.
  2. Break out your content onto different social channels - like a separate Twitter handles that would address just customer service issue.
  3. Listen. Listen to what the market, your customers, your competitors are saying about (your) customer service. You will quickly find out that there are a ton of topics/ideas/stories that you can be talking about.
  4. Engage with social media consultants who can help you craft a good, solid strategy to address this problem.

Question: How can you use social media to ensure and develop brand loyalty being a contact center providing webcare?

Answer: This is the fun part of social media and one of the best parts about building brand advocates.

  1. Be responsive. Whenever your customers meet you in the social world, respond back to them! Whether it is positive or negative, respond to them, especially if they've posted on your page, on your blog site, or mentioned you in a Tweet. And be sure to respond quickly. Studies show that most people expect to responded to within 30-60 minutes.
  2. Do something to recognize the customers who are your advocates. Recognize and reward your fans (some good examples are ZenDesk and Zappos). Hold contests where they can win prizes. Localize meetings (TweetUps) where avid fans can meet each other, share ideas and best practices.
  3. Create hashtags around it various topics that involve your customers.
  4. Most importantly - make sure that you provide a good product/service to your customers. Regardless of how great of a job you do with the items above, if your product/service still sucks, then no amount of effort in the tasks above will make any impact.

Question: Other than social media monitoring for crisis management and reputation management, what are other uses of social media for blue-chip companies?

Answer: There are any number of other ideas, here are a few: Crowd sourcing, product research, building brand awareness, building brand advocates, building a community of followers, message notifications, sales and service, and marketing activities (product launches).

Question: What is the best way to quality control the interactions through Social Media?

Answer: Probably the most effective way is through training. The more you know, the better your quality. Additionally, some of the social monitoring tools today have workflows built into them that would allow supervisory review, making sure that every tweet/Facebook post/Blog response is reviewed prior to getting sent.

Question: How do you build a strategy to provide multi-lingual social media customer service?

Answer: What we did here at Interactive Intelligence was to build out separate Facebook sites and Twitter handles or the different languages we wanted to interact with. We found that if you tried combining them, you ran into content that that was posted/tweeted to followers who couldn't understand it. Additionally, we gave ownership of those sites/pages to employees within those regions who natively spoke that language.

Question: What are the most effective KPIs for Twitter and Facebook?

Answer: Good question. There is still a lot of debate over this, not only identifying what those KPI's are, but the measurements should be. Here's a link to an article that probably sums it up better than I can - http://www.smartinsights.com/customer-relationship-management/customer-service-and-support/measuring-social-customer-service/.

Question: What is the opinion on using social media dashboard apps such as Tweetdeck that can automatically send out scheduled tweets?

Answer: We love them and highly recommend them! How else can you get your Tweets out at the right time unless you have a tireless staff blasting them out! Internally we use Hootsuite, but there are many other tools that you can use. I did a quick Google search and landed upon this site - http://www.maketecheasier.com/6-tools-to-auto-schedule-cross-post-n-social-networks/2012/07/05.

Question: With Social Media being relatively new, are you finding that the majority of social media contact comes from younger customers?

Answer: That seems to be the perception, doesn't it? But it really depends on the demographic of your brand. For customer service, I've seen several studies that show all different types of age groups are using social media. To support that, we conducted our own research on customer service earlier this year that you can download from our website - http://www.inin.com/resources/Documents/Customer-Service-Experience-Research-Study.pdf. It showed that, for customer service, 25-44 year-olds found social media more valuable than 18-24 year-olds.

Question: Are there any best practices for monitoring social media? If so, what are they?

Answer: I'm quite sure this isn't a comprehensive list, but it should get you moving in the right direction:

  1. Find a social media monitoring tool that is comprehensive.
  2. Fine-tune it for the key words and phrases that matter most to you as a brand. If you need help, bring in a consultant.
  3. Identify competitive profiles to monitor along with competitive products
  4. Look for alerts as they happen
  5. Respond to appropriate messages within the expected time frame (30-60 minutes)
  6. Have people trained to respond with the company's brand/messaging/positioning/etc.),
  7. Generate reports based on what you're monitoring in order to trends market, product, and competitive trends.

Question: What are the basic skills needed for a social media agent?

Answer: The skill set required for an agent handling social media is vastly different than for a phone agent. Here are some "must haves" to look/train for:

  1. Theability to write well.
  2. An understanding of social media - ideally someone who is already actively participating on Facebook and Twitter as well as has written blogs.
  3. The ability to make the complex simple.
  4. The ability to keep a message in 140 characters or less.
  5. The ability to communicate in other channels so that, if necessary, they can escalate up to email, chat or voice.
  6. A good understanding of the company's marketing messages and positioning

Question: As social media contact is largely in 'revenge' for poor customer service, do you think this is a major factor in the slow uptake of social media as a contact method?

Answer: From the customer service perspective, in general, I'd agree that consumers today view social media as their "last ditch effort" for gaining the attention of the company they've received poor customer service from. Having said that, it is a general statement only as there are certainly niches where this isn't true. For example, in the travel industry, there are many consumers who will turn first to social media for help. In addition, most high-profile consumer brands have vast followers engaging with them via social media for various customer service things. But for the mainstream consumer, they are still turning to the traditional channels first and frequently doing so.

So, what do I see as the major factor in the slow update of social media as the preferred contact method? There are several reasons:

  1. It is a poor channel for the vast majority of customer problems, as communication is far from efficient.
  2. Voice is the channel of tradition.
  3. Voice is quicker. I expect to talk to a representative within seconds whereas social could take anywhere from minutes to hours.

Question: Typical Call Centers and Social Media communications are typically managed by different entities within companies, where are you seeing the combined management responsibilities today?

Answer: I haven't seen many organizations sharing this responsibility as it mostly resides within the marketing department. I couldn't give you any insights into whether there is a certain size of an organization or a vertical segment that is leading the way with share responsibilities for social media.

Question: Do you have a planning template to establish social customer service if we are just starting? We learned a lot of elements & ingredients for improvements in this presentation.

Answer: Thanks for the feedback and we're glad you found it helpful. At this time we do not have a planning template, but it sure is something we'll consider working on.

Question: How many respondents use both contact centers and marketing?

Answer: I believe you are referring to our poll where we asked how many people were providing customer service via their marketing or customer service teams, right? Unfortunately, the data we captured during the webinar doesn't show that. Having said that, I know that one of the respondents indicated that they were doing both. In my research and experience over the last years, this would be highly unusual as most companies just don't have the level of experience to do both. Most organizations are still loading the responsibility for social media onto the shoulders of their marketing department. Many arguments have been put forth touting the benefits of the contact center owning the channel, however.

The experts from the webinar have done all they can to answer the questions attendees had for them, and have provided valuable information and insights. Hopefully this information will help you be well-informed and educated when making your customer service decisions.

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