In the part 1 of this five part series, I discussed about training the customer service agents as a first step in empowering your agents to deliver great service on the Social Web. In the part 2, I will talk about the social customer service process that needs to be constructed and followed in order to ensure success of your social customer service strategy.
Customer service process is the heart of any customer service strategy and social customer service is no different. However, the social customer service process is a lot different than the traditional customer service as you don't completely know the customer who is interacting with your business through the social web. For example, when a customer calls your call center, you know a bit more about the person through the caller ID and based on the corresponding information from the customer database. Based on the customer type and value to your business, you have the opportunity to employ the right process to serve the customer appropriately based on your business goals. However, the same type of capability is missing from the social web, unless you have a way to tie the identity of customers on the social web with your customer database, which is not always going to be accurate. In lieu of the ability to identify the customer, the customer service process on the social web needs to follow certain principles.
Target a consistent Service Level Agreement (SLA) for all actionable posts/tweets to ensure proper experience
Though there is no committed SLA with customers on the Social Web, there is a need for setting and meeting SLAs internally to ensure delightful customer experience. It is important to prioritize conversations based on factors such as social influence, type of question and other business criteria that can ensure the service levels you have set. Having a consistent SLA can help set expectations with customers on the social web. You may want to arrive at the SLA for social customer service based on the SLAs for other service channels like Emails and adjust it according to your understanding of engagement volume for the Social Web. Within the Social Web, your SLAs can be different for different channels such as your Facebook Pages and your Twitter accounts. Prioritization across different Social Web channels can depend on the engagement volume in each channel.
Identify hot topics for each day and adjust the SLA for those hot topics
The Social Web is very dynamic and customer experience varies based on the topic that is important for them on that day. It is important to continue to monitor the trends on your social media presence and adjust SLA for those hot topics. In addition, it is important to identify the experts specific to the hot topics to help answer questions.
Identify 'similar' posts to look at the magnitude of trending topics/issues
The Social Web can magnify certain issues and can also provide opportunities to be efficient if done right. As the social customer agents try to solve the problems for each customer, it is important to identify similar issues and address them in a one-to-many fashion. The process should accommodate increased priority based on the magnitude of similar posts.
Track and follow-up with customers that were promised
This seems silly but there are many posts on Facebook pages where customers complain that the customer service promises to come back to them to answer their questions but never delivers on that promise. Since neither Facebook nor Twitter provide an easy way to track and go back to the conversations that need to be followed-up, the process should include tracking and follow-up. To enable tracking and follow-up you may consider various social media engagement tools such as Hootsuite and Cotweet. In addition, where possible, CRM integration should be utilized to escalate an engagement to a case and track it till completion. By connecting your social media feed into a CRM as necessary you will be able to take advantage of the workflow capabilities to implement your social customer service process.
Ask for feedback and testimonials from customers for a job well done
The Social Web gives a tremendous opportunity to make a positive impact to more than one customer who is specific to a conversation if great customer service is delivered. Since it is an opportunity for continuous improvement based on the direct feedback, the social customer service process should include asking for public feedback and testimonials if customers are satisfied, which can help influence the brand perception positively. Since it is not easy to go back to testimonials written on the Facebook Page wall or Twitter, customer service organizations need to find a tool to capture the testimonials and make them accessible to their social media audience, which could be a link on the Info page or a custom tab specifically designed to showcase the testimonials.
