Following on from last week's blog on the current state of social media customer service, I've taken a look at Social Bakers' highest rated US and UK retail brands (Best Buy BootsUK, NextOnline, Marks and Spencer and Tesco) to learn from their management of Facebook and Twitter.
Setting up Facebook pages
- Hours of business - no brands seemed to be responding to messages overnight, although it's likely that the pages were still being moderated and monitored for crisis issues during this period. However, none of the brands published the period during which fans could expect a response to posts, and it's worth considering doing this in order to set expectations.
- Other contact channels - can your customers reach you by phone? Email? On your website? Do you have a separate customer care Twitter account? You could add links to webforms with FAQs, (as M&S do) or a separate tab for customer service. Best Buy use 'About Us' to try to direct users with customer service queries to its forums at Best Buy Unboxed - but interestingly, doesn't point to any of its excellent Twitter customer service accounts.
- Community rules - Best Buy, Boots and Tesco all publish their 'house rules' outlining the behaviour they expect on the page, and also the service which their customers can expect from them. We recommend this for all Facebook pages. Setting clear rules on conduct, languages responded to, and ownership of content can save a lot of trouble later on.
- Languages and regions - do you have different Facebook accounts for different regions? If so, and if you're not set up as a Global page, then it would be good to take a leaf out of Marks and Spencer's book, and have an app directing customers to the correct page for their country. Will you respond to posts in other languages? You could make this clear in your guidelines.
- Facebook 'replies' - Enabling the replies feature will definitely make the service smoother, provided that no content is being missed. Of the pages we looked at, they were split about 50/50 between those who had enabled replies and those who hadn't. On July 10 this year, replies will be enabled by default: make sure you're prepared.
Setting up Twitter
- To tweet or not to tweet? Boots don't run a Twitter service at all: @BootsUKOfficial instead redirects to email, phone or Facebook via autoresponses: if resources are insufficient, then this is a sensible course. Remember: customers expect responses within minutes.
- Separate customer care accounts - 30% of the Interbrand top 100 brands already have a dedicated customer service feed on Twitter. Keeping customer service separate avoids the awkwardness of pushing out positive brand messages through the same door as apologies for poor performance and product issues. Most of the accounts we looked at took this approach:Tesco runs @UKTesco , clearly named as the customer care channel. Best Buy have three customer service channels, @BestBuySupport (retail support) and @Twelpforce /@geeksquad (technical support), which are clearly signposted, with their working hours set out on the profile. The UK-owned clothes retailer runs @NextOfficial as its brand marketing account, which directs through to @NextHelp for customer service issues, primarily tracking orders for NextOnline.
Engagement
- Speed and outreach Twitter is about speed, directness, personality, efficiency and humour. Twitter customer care is about catching the balls as they come flying past and making a save. These top retailer responses are speedy and helpful, with a good mix of efficiency and friendliness. Agents search for keywords on Twitter and respond in a flash:
- Adding the personal touch Best Buy, Tesco, M&S and Boots customer care staff sign their Facebook responses, Kiddicare and Next don't. There are arguments against doing so, but it's undeniable that when an agent signs their message it personalises the service. Sensing the person behind the message can deflate anger; it increases engagement and is always useful for the customer to know when they are 'talking' to the same or a different care agent
- Using humour - It works.
Tesco famously even cracked a joke at the peak of the scandal about stocking horsement:
Resources
- Coping with issues - It's essential that your customer service teams have the scalability to cope with sudden peaks in volume and that they are linked to the departments from whom they need answers quickly. Boots was recently hit by a targeted campaign from Let Toys Be Toys - For Girls and Boys, protesting against the brand's segregation of toys into boy vs girl, (pink and blue, science vs dolls - you get the idea). Twenty-four hours into the protest, with outrage mounting exponentially on its page, Boots seemed to have difficulty in coping with the volume and finding a message which would placate its angry fans.
- Choosing the right tool - Choosing an appropriate management tool will help. Zendesk, for example, connects with Facebook and Twitter, and HootSuite is great for team organisation and message assignments. Customers expect recognition - even across different social networks. Using a good tool keeps track of the interactions with a customer and - as ZenDesk does - can link a contacts' email, Google, Twitter, Facebook and phone number. Social CRM is a whole topic in its own right, but also worth a mention here is Comufy, which can help companies integrate social data to CRM systems. This goes a long way to getting a single view of a customer across different channels - really helpful to your customer service team. Moderation and management tools (such as Adobe Social or Conversocial) will let you manage and track customer conversations, as well as your responses, so you have a record for both marketing and legal purposes.
Customer CARE
- Relationship building Social customer service offers more than efficient resolution - it allows for real human interaction between the agent and the customer, and that is its trump card (and occasional downfall). Even if there seems little purpose behind a contact, it's all part of effective relationship-building: a chance to show the human face behind your brand.
Image courtesy of Striatic