Upon returning from the SOCAP and CRSummit conferences the challenge for many customer service professionals was clear.
How do I launch a social customer care program?
For the past 12 years I’ve been a huge advocate and evangelist for the contact center so I’m creating a daily 5 part series to help you get started!
Its hump day of your first week back from CRSummit, don’t lose your focus and momentum, stick with it! Remember, as customer experience leadership professionals we owe it to our consumers to get involved in social media. They are counting on us!
Let’s Get Started – Part 3!
How to Partner With Marketing – Focus on what you can both rally around, the customer! Too often I see contact center leadership get off on the wrong foot with marketing with the “Who should own social media?” discussion. If you are just launching a social care presence, you aren’t ready to own social. Here is what you DO own! Customers on Facebook and Twitter who have questions, complaints or take the time to say I love your products/services are being ignored like in this example.
Tips:
- Customer service has low-cost expert resources that can increase engagement without breaking the social media budget.
- Contact centers already work flexible hours and can help with off hours response.
- Ask marketing for their help in providing social media training for your contact center agents.
- Exceptional social service improves peer-to-peer recommendation and word of mouth, aka, THE most effective marketing.
Defining Response Swim Lanes – Consumers are slowly migrating away from traditional customer service channels and moving towards Facebook, Twitter and other social communities for service growing the online conversation.
This presents a challenge: Who is the right internal team to respond to each of these consumers? How do you keep from bumping into each other?
The answer is to define, agree and put in writing the most common categories of social conversation and who will respond to each.
For example, Sony has over 2 million fans on Facebook. Their customers have questions about promotions, future products, technical questions, fans uploading photos, quality complaints, where to buy questions and thousands of other engagement opportunities.
If each team stays in their swim lane, each customer can receive outstanding service from the most knowledgeable company ambassador.
Tip: Here is a quick and simple example of swim lanes
| Marketing/PR | Customer Service |
| Future Product Questions | Product Complaints |
| Campaign Complaints/Inquiries | Product Suggestions |
| Crisis Communications | Existing Ownership Product Inquiries |
| Blogger/Influencer Interactions | Warranty & Rebate Questions |
| Upcoming Events | Service & Policy Issues |
| Charity/Environmental Concerns | Thanking Customers For Compliments |
Get Started With a Free Social Media Listening Tool – Most global 1000 brands with a strong online customer care presence have pretty sophisticated social CRM requirements and ultimately a technology partner will become a necessity.
However, don’t let the process of creating an RFP, approving a budget and choosing a vendor stand in your way of getting started right now!
HootSuite is an awesome tool for beginners that will allow you to track your brands Facebook pages, Twitter handles and company blog. You can also create custom searches based on keywords/hashtags (i.e. top product name). Most importantly, you can respond and engage directly with consumers via HootSuite. Actually most importantly, did I mention Hootsuite is free?
See you tomorrow when I discuss;
1. Customer Care Goals & Strategies
2. How to Set Up a Personal Twitter Account
3. Social Media Thought Leaders
If you missed Monday’s Get Started! Social Service – Part 1 post, you can find it right here: https://chadschaeffer.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/get-started-social-service-part-1/
The focus was on 3 things.
1. Where are customers talking about your brand?
2. What are they saying?
3. How well are you responding to customer service opportunities today?
Tuesday’s post Get Started! Social Service – Part 2 is right here; https://chadschaeffer.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/get-started-social-service-part-2/
Tuesday’s key topics.
4. What is your current response time?
5. When are customers talking about your brand (day/time)?
6. How to start responding if you aren’t today
Chad - Rappin' On Social Customer Service 