Published on June 2013 by Conversocial Original: http://rafam.co/mmspq

1. The definitive guide to
Social Customer Service

2. 2
What is Social Customer Service?
Social Customer Service is now recognized as one of the most
important points of contact between companies and their
customers. Through best practice examples and practical
advice, this guide explores why social for customer service is
your most critical business need, and how it can support the
interests of your entire organization.
Social communication is not a new phenomenon, but many remain unsure
of how to leverage it for business. Today, the most successful companies are
moving from ‘social for social’s sake’ to use social communication to achieve
strategic goals.
For example, Gartner outlines four core integrations for social media into
existing disciplines: Social for Customer Service, Social for E-commerce,
Social for Marketing and Social for Sales.*
The first edition of Conversocial’s Definitive Guide to Social
Customer Service offered advice for companies looking to setup
a basic Social Customer Care team, but in just the past year
customer expectations have accelerated rapidly, demanding that
brands respond with mature engagement strategies that provide
true value. In this edition of the guide, Conversocial has wisely
taken the social media framework and best practice examples
a step further, outlining how to develop a highly skilled team
that’s connected to the enterprise while delivering on metrics
that justify the value of Social Customer Service at scale. At the
end of the last guide, Conversocial CEO Joshua March predicted
that companies would move beyond early dabblings in Social
Customer Service by reorganizing internally around a social
experience that permeates the entire company. I’ve begun to see
this happen in smart, nimble companies that understand that social
customer service is an opportunity for deep engagement. My hope
is that this guide will help you take advantage of this chance to
differentiate your service and, ultimately, your brand.
- Evan Shumeyko, Head of Ogilvy Social Customer Care Practice
“
“
* “The Preposition Makes All The Difference When You Go From Social CRM to Social for CRM” Published February 2013.

3. 3
Contents Making the case for Social Customer Service
In this section we explain how Social Customer Service is vital to success in
multiple areas of your business.
Level one: Creating a Social Engagement Hub
It’s important to define the people, processes and tools for customer
engagement through social channels.
Read these steps to develop your Social Engagement Hub, whether you’re
introducing a Social Customer Service team to your business for the first
time, or want to restructure to integrate social engagement business-wide.
• What the Social Engagement Hub looks like
• How to understand customer demand on social channels
• How to support your entire business through Social Customer Service
01
02
In this section we explore:
Level two: Building a Social Customer Service Machine
How do you put theory into practice and develop processes to meet the
unique demands of the Social Engagement Hub?
Read these best practice suggestions on how to run a Social Customer
Service operation that delivers an amazing experience to your customers and
value to your business.
• How to get to real customer issues, quickly
• How to deliver socially-savvy service that meets – or beats – customer expectations
• How to prepare for the unexpected: escalation and crisis response
• Best practice hiring and training
• Proactive customer service
03
In this section we explore:
Level three: Measure, Refine and Scale
How do you know how your program measures up?
Read these recommendations and calculations to develop and grow your
Social Customer Service in a valuable way.
• Industry analysis of the value of Social Customer Service
• Quality measures on the value to the customer
• Effectiveness measures for the impact of your program
• Actionable insight for real business changes
• How to measure ROI
04
In this section we explore:

4. Making the Case for Social Customer ServiceSection
01

5. 5
Making the Case for Social Customer Service
Social Customer Service is now fully established
as a consumer requirement; millions of people
are taking service issues to social channels as
their preferred communication route. These
questions and complaints are public, and the
only real option available for businesses is
how, not if, they will respond. The idea of one-
way social marketing has become antiquated,
1. You can’t ignore Social Customer Service
but despite this many businesses still fail to
understand just how critical a serious Social
Customer Service program has become.
Listening is no longer an end, but rather a
means to evaluating where you need to engage.
If you find yourself justifying the cause for good
social care, the best arguments come from your
customers.
The first and absolutely most important thing you should do in social media is listen to your consumers/custom-
ers and answer their questions. You should work out how to do this before you figure out how to drive ‘likes’ on
Facebook, what content to produce or how to measure engagement. Because if you do this, consumers will
‘like’ the brand, rather than just the Facebook page
- Richard Stacy, Social Media Trainer, Social Media Architecture
“ “
Consumers Demand Social Customer Service
Social customer care
users who engage
every day
People who think social
media will become the next
tier of customer service
People who think
companies should offer
customer support on their
profiles
“I want to speak
with a real person”
“We want to engage
with you on the go”
#listentome
01 04
02 05
03 06
18-24 year olds who use
social media for customer
care
Social media users who
prefer to reach out to a
brand for customer service
over social channels
Social customer care
users who engage several
times a month
59% 1/3
51%
78%63%
9%
01

6. 6
Due to the public nature of questions and
complaints on social media, fear about brand
damage and PR crises is one of the primary
drivers for the creation of Social Customer
Service teams. Social media demands a new
approach to crisis, where corporate silence
or PR statements fail to satisfy expectations
2. Your Reputation Depends on Social Customer Service
for social brands. Delivering a high level of
personalized engagement is the best way to
combat negativity online, which ultimately
affects the bottom line. Your social reputation is
worth a great deal to your customers, and can
affect how much they are worth to you.
Consumers that are
affected by other customers’
comments on your page
1 negative customer
message in public can wipe
out the effect of up to 5
positive ones
83%
88%
The Consequenses Of Ignoring Social Customer Service
01 04
02 05
06
96.5%
03
Consumers who will be
less likely to buy from you
after seeing unanswered
questions
Customers experiencing
positive social care are 4x
more likely to endorse you
than those who don’t
The biggest cause of
1 decade of social media
crises was poor customer
experiences shared online
Social media users who
have abandoned a purchase
after poor customer service
01

7. 7
Social Customer Service pays off. Satisfied social customers are more loyal to your brand, increasing
lifetime customer value. By managing customers’ issues publicly on social channels, you can expand
the reach of your team and reduce your cost to serve. On social media, agents can handle more
queries, more rapidly, and customers can find solutions shared with others before they need to ask.
3. Your Customer Relationships will Benefit from Social Customer Service
Social is more efficient
Encouraging customers to use social channels
for customer care by offering a better
experience can help reduce the cost to serve.
70% of consumers who use social media for
customer service are likely to do so again if they
are satisfied with their experience. But for those
who try and have an unsatisfactory experience,
only 41% will try again.*
According to a recent report from Gartner, the
social CRM agent can manage four to eight
times more high-value interactions, compared
with a traditional, voice-based contact center
agent.**
Sources:
* http://nmincite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NM-Incite-Report-The-State-of-Social-Customer-Service-2012.pdf
** Use This Beginner’s Guide to Outsourcing Social CRM
† Bain and Company, American Express
http://about.americanexpress.com/news/docs/2012x/AMEX_Service_Infographic.pdf
http://www.social-exposure.com/engaged-customer-spend-more-and-are-more-loyal/
Social increases customer value
Customers who engage with your company
on social channels are likely to spend 20-40%
more than those who don’t.† Quality interaction
is a major differentiator for most industries,
and can set your offering apart from your
competitors. While robust social customer care
takes hold as the industry norm, companies
have a major opportunity to stand out as
customer-centric.
01

8. 8
Where are you now?
Elementary Explorer Advocate
Marketing
Inactive
No Resolution
Customer Service
Reactive
First Contact Resolution
Social Engagement Hub
Proactive
Pre-contact Resolution
We developed the Definitive Guide to Social Customer Service to help take your program to
Advocate status, no matter where you fall on the maturity scale.
What do the experts say?
Source:
Altimeter: The Evolution of Social Business
The Six Stages of Social
Business Transformation.
Planning
Listen &
Learn
Understand how
customers use social
channels
Prioritize strategic goals
where social can have
most impact
Presence
Stake our
claim
Amplify existing
marketing efforts
Encourage
sharing
Engagement
Dialog Deepens
Relationships
Drive
consideration to
purchase
Provide direct support
Internal employee
engagement
Converged
Business
is Social
Social drives
transformation
Integrates social
philosophy into all
aspects of the
enterprise
Formalized
Organise
For Scale
Set governace
for social
Create discipline
& process
Strategic business
goals
Strategic
Become A
Social Business
Scale across
business units
Moves into HR, Sales,
Finance & Supply Chain
C-level Involvement
01

9. Level one: Creating a Social Engagement HubSection
02

10. 10
Level one: Building A Social Engagement Hub
Around Your Customer
No two companies are identical. Your social
customer relationships are shaped by the
unique product, services and approach that you
offer.
When working out what your Social
Engagement Hub looks like, the most important
things to consider are:
What is the Social Engagement Hub?
The people, processes and tools for customer engagement through social channels.
01 Customer demand
02
Business-wide objectives for
customer engagement
03
The internal resources
you have available
Here we look at how you can best work
collaboratively and organize resources to
develop a first-class Social Customer Service
operation that delivers value for your business.
02

11. 11
Assessing Your Need: Customer Expectations
and Behavior
Consumers are not only starting to favor social
over traditional service channels, but they’re
now also able to communicate an entirely new,
often time-sensitive, set of issues.
Whereas in the past a customer would have
been unlikely to email you regarding the length
of your checkout lines, a quick Tweet made in-
store will make this a very public problem. There
could be huge value for you to reply and fix the
problem – but only if you do this before they
leave the store.
These type of issues offer you a powerful
opportunity to delight a customer in real-time.
Discovery: what do your customers say?
Urgent
Dissatisfaction
Technical
Sensitive
FAQ
Positive
Feedback
Understanding customer issues 01
in-store, mid-purchase...
unhappy customer, exposure of bad experience...
an account-specific issue, a problem that requires investigation, issues for a specialist team...
a PR crisis, questions on corporate policy, brand defamations...
simple questions that have an online resource
sharing positive experience, general love...
on campaigns, on products and services, not looking for answers
A simple way to understand the issues your customers are bringing
over social media is to review and categorize one week’s tweets and
comments.
02

12. 12
Understanding expectations for speed 02
Social networks exist to connect individuals via
instantaneous communication channels. Speed
is at the heart of social interaction.
For businesses, these time considerations are
even more important. In creating a social brand
presence, you have opened an extremely quick
and convenient channel where customers can
reach out for help.
But just how quick you need to be depends on
how active your customer base is on social, as
well as on the types of issue they’re bringing to
you over social channels.
Source:
http://initi8marketing.co.uk/power-to-the-people-infographic/
Average response times demanded
02

13. 13
Understanding volume 03
Your ability to meet tight service levels depends
on the volume of messages you receive at any
particular time, and the resources you have
in place. If you receive 10 customer service
messages per hour, it’s quite likely that one
dedicated Social Customer Service agent can
meet this demand. If you receive hundreds
of messages each hour, you will only be able
achieve the response times customers expect
by having a bigger team in place to process
these interactions.
While you can only discover exactly how
quickly your agents will be able to handle social
messages by building up your team, leading
companies have found that fully trained agents
can handle 4-8 times the number of messages
on social media as they can over the phone.
Go Daddy’s highly trained agents handle over
200 tweets per week, handling customers’
detailed technical issues. Our research has
found that across all social platforms and
industries, it’s possible for agents to deal with
anything in the range from 500-2000 social
messages in a month.
Understanding engagement times 04
The public nature of Conversocial, combined
with high expectations, means that the times
at which consumers get in touch are far more
important than for private channels.
There can be a huge variance in both the times
of day and days of the week that consumers
prefer to engage with companies in different
industries. If your customers are most active
during evenings and the weekend, but your
team is only available on weekdays from 9-5,
you could be missing the majority of customer
complaints while they have the greatest
audience.
Build your staffing plans around these habits,
and don’t presume they fall in line with your
traditional call center patterns.
Conversocial automates the process of
comprehensively calculating message
volumes and times, tracking how each of
these changes over time. This combined
with advanced data categorization gives
the complete picture of customer demand,
allowing you to plan resourcing effectively.
How Conversocial Helps
02

14. 14
What Does A Social Engagement Hub Look Like?
How Do You Connect With Your Customers ?
Your customers are reaching out to you on public social channels, with a brand new set of problems and questions.
A contact centre doesn't cut it anymore, and your marketing department doesn't have the information your customers
need. For your brand to deliver a human experience, that has the answers, a fully connected Social Engagement Hub is the
only way to connect with your customers on their terms.
Marketing
Insight
?
Deliver a fully connected
customer experience
Communications
Social Customer Service
?
Social Network Conversations
Management
i
Identify customer
conversations that
need a response
Deliver excellent
customer service
in real-time
Fix customers’
problems at the
heart
Exceed customer
expectations and
build stronger
relationships
02
01 03
04
?
Question
Rant
Suggestion
Praise
?
Question
Rant
Suggestion
Praise
02

15. 15
As customer service becomes the most
important area of social engagement, more and
more companies are creating dedicated social
care teams that are responsible for processing
all incoming messages, engaging with
customers, dealing with issues, and escalating
the minority that require input from elsewhere
in the business. Giving customer service a
voice on social means you can leverage these
channels as a real-time information tool for
customers, making sure they have the most
up to date details on service. To best meet
customer demand with the level of resources
you have, consider where these agents can
come from internally, who you might need to
hire afresh, and where outsourcing can help
you scale.
Customer Service
Certain customer messages can’t be
dealt with by your agents single-handedly.
Revisiting your common issues, who needs to
support your engagement team with further
instruction and information to respond to
atypical conversations? Service managers
may be required to sign off a certain number of
conversations each day, or to approve trainee
agents’ public messages. Communications
Managers may need to become more active in
providing approved responses when a
crisis hits.
Brand Protection
Quality customer engagement and a high level
of service is one of the best ways to ensure
marketing effectiveness - customer service
and marketing need to be closely aligned on
messaging, engagement and sales to create
one consistent brand presence. The company
voice should be unified, so working together to
ensure you avoid a split social personality
is crucial.
Marketing Effectiveness
Who’s interested in customer service
performance across the business, and who
requires insight from the vast amount of data
unearthed in social conversations? Setting
up a direct chain between Social Customer
Service and product or customer insight teams
is one of the fastest ways to pick up on supply
chain issues, customer opinion or campaign
effectiveness.
Insight and Reporting
It helps if Social Customer Service teams work
closely with content and knowledge base
management teams, or be involved directly in
content creation. By tracking frequently asked
questions, new product questions, and common
customer pain points, teams can identify where
gaps exist in the content.
- Michelle Kostya, Senior Manager of Social Media
Enablement at Rogers Communications
“
“
What do the experts say?
Have you got everything covered?
Delivering social customer service is more
than just being reactive and solving customers
issues quickly and efficiently. While this is
certainly important, an opportunity exists for
brands to create real-time content proactively
based on current customer pain points. Not only
does this fill the content gap, but it also drives
search engine visibility and at the same time,
decreases calls into the call center.
- Michael Brito, VP Social Business Strategy, Edelman
Digital.
“
“
02

16. Level two: Building a Social Customer
Service Machine
Section
03

17. 17
Social Customer Service Processes
Filtering through social data is a major challenge
for any brand receiving even a moderate volume
of customer interactions.
Unlike private one-to-one service channels,
social engagement channels are hugely diverse.
A study of retailers using Conversocial found
that only around 50% of social media messages
merited an agent’s attention, and only 10% of
these required a response. But this demand to
noise ratio varies across brands and industries,
with service providers often seeing much higher
volumes of actionable conversations in the
range of 50-80%.*
It’s important to define criteria for what your
team should be giving their attention to first.
What’s high priority? What should be always
guaranteed to get a response?
Every company is different, but here’s a
framework for identifying what counts:
First-tier priority
• A customer asking you a direct question
• A customer expressing dissatisfaction
• Customers that have an urgent product/
service need
• Escalating potential crisis issues
Second-tier priority
• General references of your products and
services
• Positive experiences of your products
and services
• Indirect references that are relevant to
your industry
Prioritization 01
* Conversocial customer data
We’ve designed a Priority Response
Engine to identify interactions that need
a response. We combine a number of
intelligent technologies, including historic
interaction analysis and machine learning to
detect whether a message is a question, or
something you’d usually respond to.
This priority engine is also applied to
advanced Boolean searching of Twitter,
so that you can identify customers raising
important issues and those who are in
need of help and assistance to target them
before it’s too late – even if they’re not
reaching out directly.
How Conversocial Helps
Developing a Social Customer Service program has a number of unique
requirements that aren’t encountered in a traditional customer service setting.
03

18. 18
Social Customer Service is all about being where your
customers are in order to deliver a great experience.
Resolution 02
Like any other channel, when customers come
to you on social media they want to carry on
their existing conversations with you, not start
afresh. This is a major challenge in a mult-
channel customer service world, but get it right
and you can offer a much better customer
experience.
Firstly, make sure that your team has full
visibility of your customers’ social history. Are
you already in the middle of a conversation?
Have you had similar conversations in the past?
Has the customer previously had a positive or
negative relationship with your brand? Which
agent has dealt with them before? This is all
important information that your team should
be equipped with before they wade into a
conversation.
Secondly, as fully integrated into the customer
service environment, your team should have
complete access to CRM data and other
systems that hold information on customer
records from other channels. A record of
interactions across systems is the most
important step towards a single view of the
customer.
Know who you’re talking to
Consumers know that social media offers a
different customer experience to the channels
they’ve been used to previously. They’ve chosen
to speak with you there as it’s convenient and
human, and they have potentially exhausted –
and lost confidence in – other channels.
Offering resolution over social media is
important for brand and consumer. The
consumer gets the kind of interaction they were
looking for, and the brand can display publicly
how they handled the matter positively. What’s
more, if you resolve on social, any thanks the
customer gives will be public too. Anxiousness
about dealing with sensitive customer
information publicly can usually be resolved
by making use of Facebook and Twitters’
private messaging functionality. This protects
brand and customer while avoiding redirection
and a manipulated experience. If it becomes
necessary to take the issue to another channel,
you’ve earned your customer’s respect and trust
by keeping it on social for as long as possible.
Redirection isn’t good customer service
Social Customer Service has a benefit often overlooked by brands – especially the brands that force
their customers to Direct or Private messages when they offer support – it can create an archive of
answers that is searchable and open up the possibility to help more customers than the original poster.
Social Customer Service teams, whether on Twitter, blogs or community forums should consider if their
response has the potential to help other people that may be looking for the same answer. When the
response will, and it doesn’t include private customer information the agent could make the response
public. Not only may it help others, but it will let the community know that the question has been
answered!
- Michelle Kostya, Senior Manager of Social Enablement, Roger Communications
“
“
What do the experts say?
03

19. 19
For sensitive or detailed customer issues that require escalation to another team member, it’s
important to have clear processes in place so that your agents can easily handle incoming messages
without confusion or delay.
Escalation 03
01
Clear guidelines explaining which
messages agents can respond to.
Develop an escalation map that provides:
02
A comprehensive breakdown of the
types of messages frontline agents can’t
immediately respond to, and the team
responsible for each type.
03
A quick method of escalating messages,
along with the full case history and context,
to the relevant team.
01
Look at the messages you receive on your
social channels, and pick out some real-life
examples of messages that do and don’t
need a response, to share with your team.
Tips for effective escalation
02
Make the first level of escalation the agent’s
team leader, who can determine whether
any ambiguous customer messages should
be escalated further, and track the ongoing
performance of their agents.
03
Again, look at your customer messages,
and pick out some real examples of brand-
related tweets/posts that should be passed
to communications. Identify criteria for your
supervisors and make sure they are well
connected into the PR or marketing team,
and potentially to experts in other areas of
the business.
04
Make your escalation map a live
document. For extremely sensitive
issues, your front line agents should be
equipped with a continually updated list
of topics that will need PR approval when
formulating a response.
Conversocial allows for quick and easy
assignment across team members,
with private internal notes to support
knowledge sharing while keeping the
Social Customer Service team at the helm
of customer engagement. An approval
workflow can help protect against
inappropriate messages going public
before agents are ready.
How Conversocial Helps
Start
Access the
message
Evaluate the
purpose
Unhappy
Customer?
Are the facts
correct?
Are the facts
correct?
Dedicated
Complainer?
Comedian
Want-to-be?
Do you need
to respond?
NegativePositive
No Response
Can you
add value?
No
Yes
Respond in kind
and share
Thank the
person
No
No
No
No No
Can you address
the issue?
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
YesYesYes
Escalate
Explain what is
being done to
correct the issue
Gently correct
the facts
Does customer
need/deserve
more info?
Take reasonable
action to resolve
issue and let
customer know
action taken
03

20. 20
Social media provides an early warning system
for new business issues, from campaigns
and product launches to serious reputational
problems. It’s also the fastest medium for
corporate crises to spread, with a high risk of
brand damage.
For these reasons it’s critical to have a clearly
defined social crisis response plan in place.
Ensure your PR team can pick up on potentially
damaging issues as quickly as possible, work
with management on the official response if
needed, then collaborate effectively with your
frontline social agents on getting that message
to customers.
Your social care team can provide a greater
communication reach over platforms such as
Facebook and Twitter than the PR team can
achieve via traditional media. Social has proven
to be a very effective channel to distribute
an official reaction to issues affecting your
customers.
Crisis response plan 04
01
Create a holding message as quickly as
possible when a potential social crisis
emerges - consumers look for a very
quick reaction to issues over social media.
Tips for effective crisis protection
02
When a social media issue escalates,
draft responses to different types of
customer message for the customer care
team, to show responsiveness and avoid
appearing evasive.
03
Establish clear criteria for when a
message has to be escalated to PR
team (based on content and number of
comments/likes/shares).
04
Create a schedule outlining who exactly
will be responsible for dealing with these
escalated messages at any given time,
so that nothing can be dropped through
the cracks.
Conversocial is designed to keep you up
to date, in real-time, of changes in your
social communication. A management
dashboard informing you to the minute
of any changes in volume and possible
problems associated with a spike, ensures
that the entire business can collaborate in
coordinating a timely response.
How Conversocial Helps
03

21. 21
Setting up a Social Customer Service team
presents new requirements that probably aren’t
quite met by your existing teams. These agents
need to have strong customer service skills
combined with competency in a public facing
role. On social, your agents are your brand
ambassadors.
In a recent report addressing resource planning
for customer service organizations, Gartner
recommended that “Consumer-facing customer
service organizations are advised to segment
the agent pool into a separate social media
team, and to share the learning that comes from
the smaller teams.” *
Based on experience working with
major enterprises to set up their Social
Customer Service operations we echo that
recommendation. Forming a specialized Social
Customer Service team within your existing
customer service organization maximizes
impact. These teams have specific skillsets that
can be provided to HR in the hunt for the
perfect recruit.
Strong written communication skills
What to look for:
Training Your Team on Social Customer Service Process
Who to hire?
Good customer service case history
Motivated by improving customer
relations
Good judgment
Use of social channels in personal
communication or an interest in learning
Hiring new dedicated Social Customer
Service representatives
You can look for the skills you need and for
experience in social.+
You can look for a history in customer
service and ensure they’re customer-
engagement focused.
+
They still need training in your existing
systems.-
They may be hard to come by!-
Recruiting from your existing customer
service team
They’re fully accustomed to your call
center knowledge base and customer
service processes.
+
They need training in public communication,
brand guidelines and social tone.-
Training your social team in customer
service
They’re already competent and confident
in conversing with customers socially.+
They aren’t trained in your existing customer
service processes and knowledge bases.-
They aren’t trained in customer service and
may not have the skills required to deal with
customers in this way.
-
As you scale, this may prove to be a much
more expensive staffing option.-
* “The Social CRM Resource Planning Guide for Customer Service Organizations” August 2012
03

22. 22
Before your agents start posting and tweeting live on your branded accounts,
it’s important to deliver training and set up the right security processes.
Turning Social Customer Service hires into
a Social Customer Service workforce
Training:
Confidence-building
The move from customer service
representative to brand ambassador is a
significant psychological shift. Rather than
focusing on how prepared you are to hand
over control, you should instill your agents
with the conviction to engage on behalf of their
employer.
Brand understanding
Customer Service, along with many other
departments, is often only privy to brand
messages in the lightest of ways – HR’s brand
values won’t cut it for these roles. You need
to share the brand impression you’re trying to
create externally.
Work on real customer issues
Handling real customer comments and tweets
is the best way for your agents to become
familiarized with what they’ll be managing on
a daily basis, and understand how to react
publicly.
Resources to handle diverse issues
If you’re starting off small, you likely won’t
have a completely segmented social division
based on specialization. Your team should
at least know how to find information for
the lion’s share of customer inquiries, either
through a knowledge base or via efficient
internal communication.
Establish how you’re going to
track development
An approval process can be the best way to
get agents handling real issues, while giving
the freedom to ‘practice’ without risk. Tracking
approval rates and reasons for rejection can
help you identify how your agents can improve
to manage social communication autonomously.
How Hertz does it:
At Hertz, we began with a selection of
internationally based customer service
representatives from the very start of our
program. We wanted to let our customers around
the world know that social media was a reliable
customer service channel. In communications
and marketing, we trained customer service
agents on handling customer communication
publicly through WebEx sessions and live training
sessions using real customer issues in order to
acclimate agents to these new channels before
going live.
We have gradually shifted front-line
communication from marketing to
customer service over a period of several
months to ensure the transition into the contact
center would be seamless and would not
harm our brand’s reputation or our customer
relationships. By developing good working
relationships with Customer Service, we know
we’ve got a sustainable model to offer customers
the best possible experience.
- Lemore Hecht, Communications and Social Media
Manager, Hertz
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23. 23
When you’ve determined how you want your Social Engagement Hub to work, with repeatable Social
Customer Service processes, a good way to keep consistency across your teams is to formalize
these guidelines into a playbook.
Your playbook should form a go-to resource for your agents, both trained and newly hired. Gartner
also recommends “Use the marketing department’s experience with social media to more rapidly gain
competency, learn best practices and obtain access to their technology”* Bringing in the marketing
department to communicate branding guidelines in an evergreen resource is the best way to transfer
social engagement to customer care.
Why are you using social media and what
are the company goals?
To respond to customers within a certain
time? To make sure responses are completely
accurate? It’s important to give your
agents a strong focus when handling social
communication. They need to be trusted with
more flexibility to manage an ever-changing
channel with limited time to act, but that
doesn’t mean you can’t provide guidance. Key
motivators and priorities will help empower
your team to make the best judgment while
delivering fast service to your customers.
Checklist:
Creating a Social Customer Service playbook:
Introduction to social platforms
If you’re bringing in agents from the contact
center, although social media skills are
desirable, it’s best to include the details of
how the different platforms you’re using
work, and how conversations can be seen
publicly in different scenarios for those who
are less familiar.
Tone of voice
Descriptions of the brand personality
you’d like agents to convey through their
engagement with customers can form a
good guiding principle.
Do’s and Don’ts for engagement
Being explicit with examples of what
responses would and would not be a brand
fit is a good way to demonstrate brand and
tone guidelines and avoid misinterpretation.
Example responses
Providing example responses to common
customer issues can help your team to
understand how to craft their own. It’s
important that agents use these as a guide in
conjunction with tone guidelines, rather than
templates to be copied directly.
A list of resources to find support
information
Evergreen content and peer-to-peer
community is invaluable when it comes to
scaling your social customer care team’s
efforts. Your agents’ go-to resources could
include anything from knowledge-base articles
and how-to videos to solutions posted to a
branded community. Linking to this existing
content can help your team to shorten
response times and remain relevant.
Processes agents should be following
Document your response, escalation and crisis
processes as tackled already in this guide
so that they are accessible by every agent.
Explain clearly the steps for processing a
customer message, including how to respond,
what data to record such as sentiment and
categories, and when to archive away.
Contact details for everyone relevant
Make sure that your playbook has a complete
directory of everyone to address for different
customer needs or social situations.
* “The Social CRM Resource Planning Guide for Customer Service Organizations” August 2012
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24. 24
How are you going to project your brand image
through many voices?
If you have more than one person responding to
queries decide whether you want a unified tone of
voice. i.e are you happy for each agent to have their
own identity or do you want the customer journey to
always be the same?
Have you thought about...?
Best practice planning from Rebecca Doyle,
Assistant CRM Manager, ODEON Cinemas
Think about how you’d react to
different phrasing.
Try not to use the same stock response for
answering queries. Have a guideline to the right
answer but know when being a robot will exacerbate
the situation.
For examples, the difference between “Thank you
for getting in touch, could you please contact our
customer services team onxxxx” and “Hi xxx,
Thanks for taking the time to get in touch. Our
Customer Services team will be able to help you
further, would you mind giving them a call on xxxxx”
can be a real game-changer.
Are you managing your customers’
expectations?
Make sure customers know you always care, even if
you can’t always be listening. Not everyone can be
there 24/7 to answer customers’ queries. If you’re
not around at the weekend, or late into the evening,
perhaps write a post and pin it to the top of your
Facebook timeline with an alternative means to
contact you.
Know when to be proactive and reactive.
If your company is making a difficult change such
as a price increase, which you know will get a lot
of attention via social media, consider the best way
to react. Will it be better to let everyone know and
contain the anger on to one post, where you own
the conversation? Or is it better to be reactive and
wait for people to simmer down? Sometimes, your
actions can add fuel to the fire.
Be structured.
When a crisis does erupt you don’t have much time
to react, and holes in your system will really slow
you down while your team flounders. Get a clear
team structure in place to ensure that someone
can take control of coordinating a reaction, and
make sure that if someone in your escalation chain
is unavailable you’ve marked out someone else to
turn to. Have a selection of PR-approved messages
ready for agents that go above and beyond their
normal responses.
Think of every possible scenario with your crisis
escalation procedure.
It’s important that this is watertight. What happens
if something goes viral over a period where no-one’s
working e.g. evenings and weekends? There’s no
point in creating plans and documentation that
quickly become useless when you’re not there
to execute.
Have you actually defined what a crisis is?
Does your CEO spotting a negative comment with a
few likes constitute a crisis, or is it when a post has
over 200 likes in a 2 hour period? Agents can’t begin
to follow your crisis procedure if they aren’t sure
quite when to jump into crisis mode. There are many
different criteria for what’s important on social media,
but using codes can help you execute a consistent
policy. At ODEON we use colours to define different
levels, e.g green = normal and red = PR crisis
Staying in control of social crises:
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25. 25
The goal of proactive customer service is to
engage with customers at their point of need,
before they come to you. This means looking
for customers who are sharing their problems,
questions and feedback publicly without
mentioning you directly, and sharing information
on service issues through social updates before
customers need to ask you for it.
Proactive Social Customer Service
What is it?
Why go the extra mile?
We researched consumers’ behavior on Twitter
and their attachment to the ‘@’ is far from close.
Only 3% of tweets referencing America’s largest
retailers carry the @symbol. Over 1/3 of all these
indirect tweets were customer service related,
with 8% of those expressing dissatisfaction.
With the volume of Twitter conversations growing
every day, this 8% becomes a significant number
of publicly unhappy customers. A purely reactive
social customer engagement strategy misses a
huge opportunity to create positive experiences
and prevent issues from escalating.
Forrester’s Top 15 trends for 2013, found
that “Customers Expect Proactive Outbound
Communication”. But according to the latest
Forrsights Networks and Telecommunications
Survey, only 29% of enterprises are currently
investing in proactive outbound communications.
While this trend takes hold, companies have a
great opportunity to surprise and delight.
inactive
reactive
proactive
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26. 26
Looking for business opportunities on a noisy platform like Twitter isn’t as straightforward as ‘who’s
talking about me?’ Around 60% could be noise that’s unlikely to need any kind of response or
action, and different opportunities need to be handled in specific ways. Here are some examples of
conversations your Social Customer Service team should be looking to engage in.
How can you do it?
Brand
Gauge the public mood and reach out to be part
of the dialogue surrounding your name.
Product
Find out what customers are saying about
specific products, feed them the information
they need or ask for elaboration, and gain
insight for future developments.
Service
Take the opportunity to compensate for
customer dissatisfaction with great service
online, and learn where there’s room for
improvement in the customer experience.
Industry
Watch all events and issues that affect your
industry. Being the first to step in with an
appropriate comment can give you a major
competitive advantage.
Executive
What’s being said about your senior executives
is key to brand reputation on social. It’s
important to be ready for the right response to a
developing issue.
Competitors
Conversational Dynamics
Looking for appropriate engagement
opportunities in conversations about you and
your competitors can add real sales value.
Finding and assisting customers without
them referencing your brand or products is
as proactive as it gets. These customers may
be in need of information, and if approached
sensitively you have the chance to be first in
their minds.
Go Daddy strives to give customers a
positive experience of the brand, no matter
how unhappy they might be. This involves
setting up complex queries and workgroups to
target different conversations most effectively,
from technical issues to product issues to
customer love.
What the experts say:
Any time you can exceed a customer’s
expectation in terms of service, you have created
an opportunity. In fact, you likely now have a much
stronger customer relationship than you would
have had if the problem had never existed in the
first place. Most things break. If you’re proactive in
setting a positive precedent, your customer now
knows what to expect when they do.
- Craig M. Jamieson, Social Business Trainer and
Consultant, Adaptive Business Services
“
“
How Go Daddy does it:
Broken expectations yield strong reactions.
And that applies to pleasant surprises, not just
negative ones. We believe that reaching out and
offering help to customers who don’t ask for it is
the truest form of service and an effective way to
create advocates online.
- Alon Waisman, Social Media Operations Manager,
Go Daddy
“
“
03

27. Level Three: Measure, Refine and ScaleSection
04

28. 28
Level Three: Measure, Refine and Scale
One of Forrester’s Top 15 trends for 2013, is that
‘Customer Service is moving from cost center to
differentiator’. “Customer service organizations
are typically managed as a cost center.
Key success metrics focus on productivity,
efficiency, and regulatory compliance instead
of customer satisfaction. However, we are
seeing that customer service organizations
are gradually adopting a balanced scorecard
of metrics that include not only cost and
compliance, but also customer satisfaction, and
which are more suited to drive the right agent
behavior and deliver better outcomes.”
Gartner recently shared advice on the best
approach to customer service measurement in
The Social CRM Resource Planning Guide:
Businesses need to try more innovative
approaches to measurements that are less
focused on traditional efficiency metrics, and
more tied to concepts such as Net Promoter
scores, lifetime customer value, changes in
customer defection and churn rates among the
demographic using social media, and brand
sentiment.*
The customer service industry has long been
focused on delivering service at the lowest
possible expenditure: its role in the company is
often seen as a necessary evil.
Beyond the trailblazers who are revolutionizing
the position of customer service (such as
Zappos) the challenges of delivering customer
service through traditional channels have
meant that for most businesses, the customer
experience has been sacrificed to save costs.
Talk time (or lack of) has been prioritized above
customer satisfaction. A 2011 study shows
progress in this direction, with the majority of
call centers starting to get a balance between
efficiency and experience, but there’s further to
go.
What the experts say:
Too many contact centers are trying to force
fit social customer service into the mold of a
traditional call center. Traditional metrics such
as handle times, first contact resolution and
time to close simply do not fit the proper way to
enable social customer service. This ‘round peg
square hole’ approach is the likely reason that
marketing is not quite ready to give up control (if
there is such a thing as control). It’s time to bring a
coordinated and collaborative approach to Social
Customer Service. As much as we would like to
fight the core service metrics, we need some of
them. As much as we do not want to build more
process and worry about efficiency, it is not all
bad. The whole enterprise is in this together. Only
when this is realized will real progress be made.
- Mitch Lieberman, Customer Experience Architect and
Strategist, Managing Partner, DRI
“
“
Somewhat successful
42.7%
Somewhat un-successful
11.1%
Not successful at all
1.1%
We don’t have a way to
measure success
5.8%
Extremely successful
8.8%Successful
29.9%
How successful has/have your center(s) been at
achieving the balance between call center
efficiency and customer experience?
* “The Social CRM Resource Planning Guide for Customer Service Organizations” August 2012
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29. 29
Quality Measures – what are you doing
for your customers?
Fast responses are important on social media.
It’s important to reduce the exposure of
unanswered customer issues, but customers
also expect a much quicker reaction. Track
whether agents are acknowledging customers
issues within your agreed Service Levels, which
should be faster than channels such as email
and phone.
Responsiveness
To understand whether your program is delivering, Social Customer Service
metrics should look at what’s achieved for the customer.
How many customers are you touching
proactively? Growing the numbers of messages
sent proactively to customers mentioning
your brand is a good measurement for how
effectively you’re building awareness of your
Social Customer Service team, and creating
positive experiences.
Customers reached proactively
Keep redirect rates to a minimum. Track when
an issue has been taken to another channel
rather than to private message and make sure
this happens only when absolutely necessary.
Tracking public resolutions as a target means
meeting customer expectations and developing
a permanent resource of content for customers
looking for answers.
Real resolution
Customer sentiment is important to track
for a number of reasons, but measuring how
frequently your agents convert a conversation
from a negative interaction to a positive one
can show how effectively your team is aiding
customer satisfaction.
If you’re not always meeting Service Levels,
can you spot a bottleneck? Even if you don’t
go 24/7 with service, it may be that extending
business hours into an evening shift could help
tackle nighttime backlogs for your agents in
the morning, improving responsiveness and
customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction
Track these quality measures against each
agent to understand where training is
needed.
If you’re using an approval workflow, review
reasons for rejection. Is it spelling and
grammar? Is it tone of voice?
How are your agents performing?
•
•
How could you deliver even better service?
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30. 30
When looking at organic social conversations,
the sentiment of customers’ messages is a
good way to understand changes in customer
satisfaction. Customers that are happy with the
level of service provided, and have had positive
engagements with your brand, are likely to
spend significantly more.
Customer Loyalty
Effectiveness Measures – what’s the impact?
Tracking sentiment across all public messages
is a great way to understand the image
projected of your brand. How many customers
are promoting you on social?
Opinions shared on social networks are net
promoter in action, and negate the importance
of inorganic surveys. Recording the sentiment
of every customer message is the only way
to measure this consistently and effectively.
Provide your team with clear guidelines on how
to categorize and track this.
E.g. “If a friend saw this comment, would it
improve, worsen, or not affect their perception of
the company?”
Social NPS
Sales
Leading UK telecoms provider BT demonstrates
how a fully connected Social Customer Service
team can provide real business value, by
facilitating an easy sales channel for company
and customer. In delivering positive social
engagement when faced with service issues,
and empowering the same agents to handle
sales enquiries across channels, BT leverages
social communication to convert customer
service efforts into real revenue.
How many cases are converted into sales?
Logging interactions across CRM systems
and tracking links shared by agents can give you
insight into the conversion rate from service to
sales.
How B.T. does it:
Aggregating the follower numbers of the
customers you’re engaging with can give an
indication of the potential audience of both your
customers’ complaints and their positive follow-
up messages, if they issue a public thank you.
Reach
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These channels offer readily available data on what your customers truly like and dislike about your
company, offering you the chance to engage and make a difference.
Customer insight
What types of message are retailers receiving on Facebook and Twitter?
Social media is becoming a barometer for what your customers are thinking.
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32. 32
Making Changes from the Social Barometer
How others do it
Ensuring each customer receives a positive
restaurant experience is one of the opportunities
for McDonald’s customer engagement in social.
The team has a large volume of conversation
surrounding the McDonalds brand on Twitter,
but proactively seeks feedback with a new
@Reachout_McD twitter handle, which has
had a great reception from customers. This
engagement is rolled up into insight at the
macro level, to identify opportunities: how fast,
accurate, and friendly is the service?
Social feedback forms a part of the complete
insight process including combining traditional
feedback and is harnessed to execute changes
at the restaurant level.
The real-time information available at your fingertips is a game-changer when it comes to improving
the customer experience. Don’t just tell customers you’ve listened. Tell them you’ve listened and
changed something.
McDonalds
Instead of constant fire-fighting, why not listen and fix the problem (or opportunity) at source. Build
firewalls instead of fighting fires
- Laurence Buchanan, Head of Digital Transformation and CRM propositions within Ernst & Young’s EMEIA Customer Centre
of Excellence
Conversocial allows you to tag and
categorize your incoming social messages
to make the process of organizing and
analyzing customer feedback easy and
efficient. Conversocial’s analytics make it
possible to track trends over time, and to
facilitate internal sharing of information.
You can print and send reports to
management, or export data to other
systems for analysis.
How Conversocial Helps
Nokia Care
Our Social Care presence is a key enabler of the
mission of Care to support our customers in the
channels that they are engaged in and seeking
solutions. It facilitates the continual enhancement
of our products by providing real time visibility to
emergent Care issues and organizationally it has
helped to bring down the barriers between the
social consumer and key internal stakeholders.
With our Product Quality experts being directly
engaged, we have been able to reduce the turn-
around-time for issue identification by weeks,
thereby improving Care responsiveness and
customer satisfaction.
- Sean Valderas, Care Social Media Manager for Nokia’s
America region
“
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“
“
For this leading UK train provider, Twitter offers
a chance to change all the small things about
their service, to make a real difference to the
experience of as many individuals as possible.
The vast majority of constructive feedback
raised on Twitter is passed back to management
teams, and if a positive change can be made
as a result of that, it will happen. If a customer
on a First Great Western Train tweets that
something is broken, this will be fed in real-time
to an engineer, who will make sure it’s looked
at as part of the maintenance schedule. Twitter
enables a completely new kind of service.
First Great Western
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33. 33
How do I show ROI?
According to Gallup, customers who are fully
engaged represent an average 23% premium in
terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue,
and relationship growth over the average
customer. Yet, on average, only 20% of
customers are fully engaged.*
As Social Customer Service becomes established and operations start to
scale, justifying the business value and return on investment in staff, tools
and training becomes more and more important.
Here, we address 4 key areas of the
business case for Social Customer Service:
*Blue Wolf, The Essential Guide to Customer Obsession
Protected revenue and
customer retention 01
The most significant justification for pursuing
high-quality Social Customer Service is the
value this brings to customer relationships.
Customers who engage over social have an
expectation for a certain level of service, and
every time you fail to meet this, their continued
revenue stream is at risk.
Unique Customers Helped
Annual Customer Value
Exposed Revenue Protected
x
=
Supporting customer retention, through the
customers you serve and the others who see
it, is the most compelling reason to pursue an
efficient Social Customer Service program.
Cost Savings:
call deflection and productivity 02
Encouraging your customers to choose social
media as a preferred channel can reduce the
cost to serve. Our experience, together with that
of Independent analysts suggest that agents can
manage 4-8 times as many contacts over social
channels as over the phone. This provides real
value, before you consider the potential for
public service to reduce the creation of new
issues – with resolutions and answers available
for all customers to see.
Sales & Marketing effectiveness03
Many businesses plough huge marketing
budgets into social campaigns, but fail to
acknowledge the value good service and
engagement brings to those investments,
and the damage that negative comments
can do to marketing updates. Our customers
have increased engagement by over 30%
since developing good social customer care
practices, offering high quality interactions that
support positive word of mouth, and ultimately
sales. And new, hybrid Social Customer Service
agents aren’t just handling post-sales, they’re
creating new ones.
Lean Savings04
Social Customer Service serves as an instant
barometer for customer opinion, and a window
into the issues affecting your business.
Identifying bottlenecks, disruptions, faults
and other problems as they develop provides
actionable insight into how to tighten up your
supply chain, and stop wasting revenue.
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34. 34
Leading UK Telecoms company, B.T, has
achieved significant results from effective
Social Customer Service. Their surveys found
that over 50% of customers find it easy to get
help using social media, with the majority also
now preferring these platforms to traditional
channels. This is generating significant
savings, with 54,000 calls being deflected
via social media every month, and is allowing
for effective crisis communication, with over
300,000 customers reached via Twitter during
the London riots. Most significantly, because of
the service they’ve had over social media, 90%
of customers plan on staying as customers,
and 50% say they would recommend BT to
friends. BT leads the way in sharing the value
of proactive customer service, converting
complaints into not just neutralized customers,
but advocates and upgrades.
How B.T. does it:
What the experts say:
The real question in my mind is not whether ROI is measurable or valid (it is), it’s whether ROI is the
only metric worth evaluating? Don Peppers and Martha Rogers take strategic thinking about customer-
investments one step further with their comprehensive work on Return on Customer (ROC)
Return on investment quantifies how well a firm creates value from a given investment. But what
quantifies how well a company creates value from its customers? For this you need the metric of Return
on Customer (ROC). The ROC equation has the same form as an ROI equation. ROC equals a firm’s
current-period cash flow from its customers plus any changes in the underlying customer equity, divided
by the total customer equity at the beginning of the period.”
What I like most about ROC is that it treats customers as an asset (the sum of all customer lifetime
value)… A decision to invest in social CRM needs to be aligned to an organisation’s corporate objectives
and needs to consider both short and long terms value drivers.
- Laurence Buchanan, Head of Digital Transformation and CRM propositions within Ernst & Young’s EMEIA Customer Centre
of Excellence
“
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35. 35
Afterthought: The future
of Social Customer Service
The Social Engagement Hub is about the deep integration of Social Customer
Service with the rest of your business. Customer Service Directors need to view
their Social Customer Care teams not as an off-shoot, but as a fundamental part
of how they deliver a good customer experience. To achieve this, it’s important
that they seek to integrate Social Customer Service solutions with the rest of their
systems to ensure they have a real, single view of the customer across different
channels. And with Social Customer Service fast forming the cornerstone of all
social engagement, it’s essential that the vast knowledge being generated in
real time is not siloed, but is fed directly into the rest of the business - senior
management, R&D, Marketing and Communications.
Without the right resources, commitment and leadership in place, this cross-
departmental undertaking will fail - risking your customer relationships and
leaving your brand open to a serious crisis. But if done correctly, you will increase
your customer value and customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and improve your
business processes. You now have an opportunity to engage positively with your
customers on a larger scale than ever before. Are you seizing it?
In this guide, we’ve outlined a model for how you can
support your entire organization, and your customer
experience, through Social Customer Service. But today
this is only being practiced by the most innovative of
businesses. The future of Social Customer Service is in
its recognition as a business-critical function, and a new
understanding of customer engagement.
- Joshua March, CEO Conversocial
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36. 36
To carry on the conversation with us on best practice Social
Customer Service, tweet us @conversocial, or join the discussion
on our blog at www.conversocial.com/blog
If you’d like to find out more about how Conversocial can help
you develop an effective social customer service program, get
in touch with us at sales@conversocial.com

37. Powering Social Customer Service
@conversocial
www.conversocial.com
sales@conversocial.com