Monitoring the Social Web and listening to your audience is the first step for any business in its social media strategy. Monitoring will serve the purpose of managing your brand reputation, learning about what your customers think about your product and making business decisions whether they are reactive to a specific incident/event/initiative or proactive from a strategy perspective.

However, just monitoring is not enough to take the complete advantage of the Social Web. Many businesses that are active on the Social Web have quickly figured out that they need to go beyond monitoring and listening but they need to engage and act on a 1 on 1 or 1 to many basis depending on the situation on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Often they need a very different approach in a multi-dimensional way and are quite disconnected from what has been the norm so far in dealing with customer interactions through some sort of customer service and support organizations. In addition, many businesses have been dragged into the conversation while their main objective might have been related to marketing and selling than serving customers or engaging customers in a conversation that can get prolonged.

Here are the top 10 considerations in actively engaging and communicating with your customers:

1. Have a clear business objective on why to engage with your audience. There could be multiple objectives including meeting immediate customer needs that have come up in the social media or a proactive approach to reduce customer service costs while encouraging a conversation amongst the audience or between audience and the brand. While proactive approach is always better than meeting immediate needs or reactive approach, it is likely that a business starts off with a reactive approach.

2. Have a clear policy and a set of guidelines on who will engage in the organization. At the outset this may sound simple and if you are familiar with potentially diverse conversations that can happen on social networks, you will understand how difficult this could be. The topics can range from support on existing issues, questions related to ongoing campaigns, queries on store locations and hours, or pure voicing of opinions that could be fed into product development/research teams. Such diverse topics will suggest that businesses need to spend a good amount of time in understand what could potentially be talked about and figure out who can engage in the conversation while keeping the process intact.

3. Have a set of criteria on how to prioritize conversations. While every customer's query or conversation may seem equal, it is highly unlikely that a business can engage in each and every topic on a first come and first served basis. A business may prioritize conversations that can impact business positively or negatively based on the topic/question, the customer who is asking as well as how many more such customers who could be asking the same question.

4. Optimize the communication to the channels in which the conversation is happening. The Social Web has a lot of noise and the unstructured nature makes it a lot more difficult to parse through. Each channel or social network has its own nuances in terms of length of the text or the tone of the conversation. For example, a LinkedIn conversation is more business like and a Facebook conversation is more social and friendlier. On a blog, you can be elaborate at a greater detail depending on the situation.

5. Create a set of policies on escalation and 'conversation transfers'. Due to the diverse nature of the conversations and potential representation of a brand by one or more individuals who may not know all answers, there is a need for policies that can clearly help the front-line social media team to deal with escalations and transfers to either an expert within the customer support/experience team or an expert outside the team. These policies need to be reviewed on an ongoing basis so that they are adjusted to the ground realities and optimized for greater empowerment of the employees.

6. Compose the social media team with appropriate skills. You will need to identify right individuals who are capable of having a conversation within the social web and are tuned to understanding the different nature of the Social Web. The traditional customer support process is highly structured and it is easier to be efficient. However, Social Web is completely unstructured and splattered across the web, which makes the job of a customer support agent complex.

7. Identify the success metrics that will help meet business objectives but are grounded in the Social Web realities. Metrics such as response time, first contact resolution, and average handle time have been used in the customer support area for a long time. Here the focus is always on efficiency and time spent on a particular ticket or query. However, since Social Web is an opportunity to engage to have a conversation, by nature each conversation is bound to take more time and to add to the complexity, there could be several others that can join the conversation. There is a need for making customer satisfaction and loyalty as key success metrics that can be measured with Net Promoter Score while keeping the traditional operational metrics such as average handle time and response time. Our suggestion is to identify most important metrics that can directly relate to the business objectives rather than coming up with a long list of metrics that are both difficult to measure as well as are not critical to the success of the Social Customer Support program.

8. Train the social media support team. Various aspects of training need to be taken into consideration. In-house expertise, if any, in the enterprise on handling communities can be leveraged however there is a need to take the channel specific characteristics and requirements into account.

9. Set proper expectations in the community as part of the service delivery. Though there is a reluctance of hinting any type of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) while responding to queries that need additional communication, it is important to set expectations with the customers just as we do in a traditional support channel such as Email or phone call. Great customer experience becomes critical to convince customers to change their behavior to ask a question on Facebook or Twitter and avoid expensive phone calls to your contact center.

10. Measure the service effectiveness monthly and make changes. Once launched, it is important to take stock of the actual situation on a monthly basis to make any changes required to keep marching towards business objectives. As part of the measurement, you will need to identify the levers that can be changed and the levers that can't be changed and also the parameters within which the levers can move. This is primarily to avoid the analysis paralysis attitude to reinvent the wheel whenever there is a problem. The social media team needs to be empowered to make decisions, inform executives as part of rhythm of business, and implement them quickly. Once the social network engagement starts, it is difficult to stop and the business needs to engage with customers in real-time.

Regards,
Srinivas Penumaka
Co-founder & CEO, ReadyPulse (formerly Social Yantra)
Follow me on Twitter @srinipenumaka, @readypulse
Facebook - facebook.com/readypulse

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