Nowadays, social media is one of the most important channels for customers to reach out to with complaints or questions. What happens behind the scenes usually stays a secret. How exactly is your brand handling social customer care? And more importantly, how are you organizing your social customer care team?
What works for some companies doesn't always work for others. Fortunately, companies can easily draw inspiration from interesting best practices on flexible working hours, working overtime, crisis management, remote employees, etc.
What are some of the key trends in 2015 when it comes to organizing your social customer care team?
How can social media teams make sure they're working more efficiently and effectively?
Read on to discover some of the top 2015 trends for organizing your social customer care team:
Work Smart: Delegate the Workload
On social media, it's important to filter through data to cut through the noise. This is especially important if your brand operates internationally and works with multiple social media teams across the globe. That's why managing your social media presence, in a smart way (i.e. using a social media tool to help you create smooth customer service workflow processes), is more important than ever. With the help of advanced workflows, your social media team can sift through the data to divide the workload and structure your team.
So, what's a perfect example of managing your social media presence in a smart way?
Although it might seem like a rather small change, it's important to filter on country and language to efficiently sift through the data and only see what's relevant for each social media team. By filtering on these type of conditions, you will be able to create separate mailboxes that will help you to structure the data and divide the workload amongst your social media team members.
Provide Back-Up During Crisis Situations
In the world of social, each day is different. There are times when there are more conversations than usual. Not only at specific times during the day but also during particular moments throughout the year. Hiring extra staff isn't always an option. That's why outsourcing a part of the work is the perfect alternative to cover periods of time when there's a significantly higher workload.
For example, some of our telecom customers call upon extra pairs of hands in sudden crisis situations (e.g. failing network connections, total outages, and so forth). Does YOUR brand already have a plan worked out for crisis situations?
Introduce a BYOD Policy
Mobile devices have infiltrated the social customer care field. Not only do customers prefer to use a mobile device to reach out to brands, but on the go, employees also greatly benefit from mobile devices to organize their work. For example, the option to work from home is a great alternative to make sure shifts are easily covered. Introducing a BYOD policy (i.e. employees have their own laptop at their disposal) allows employees to work remotely. Moreover, introduce mobile devices and mobile apps (to work on/with either at home or at the office) to provide customer care on the go.
In a lot of cases, the option to work from home is a great alternative to make sure shifts are easily covered. Introducing a BYOD policy allows employees to work remotely. This is very useful if you want people to work standby during the weekend. They can go about their normal activities but regularly check your brand's social feed on their mobile devices.
Take on Self-Service Customer Support
An online knowledge base is the perfect means to direct your customers to relevant links. That's why self-service customer support is incredibly useful to let your customers know they are being taken care of. Beyond an online knowledge base, it's also important to create special, dynamic forums to post regular status updates in times of crisis. Just make sure you clearly communicate about this forum on your website and in your Twitter handle to easily guide people to it. This will decrease the workload during crisis situations.
Do you want more insights in how you can efficiently organize your team? Don't hesitate to read this special eBook for more useful tips and tricks on how to organize your team.