Whitepaper

Social Media

Engage with your users and drive customer loyalty and brand value.

Social media generates an enormous amount of data, relentlessly and in real time. Every day, social media users produce an additional 500 million tweets on Twitter, create 4.5 billion more “Likes” on Facebook, and share 55 million new photos on Instagram. Still more data flows from Google+, Youtube, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Behind these staggering numbers is an ongoing and very public conversation about your enterprise and its competitors. With every passing minute, your customers reveal more information about their motivations, loyalties, preferences and dislikes. It is an unprecedented opportunity to improve sales, customer service, marketing campaigns, and product development – but only if your organization knows how to listen and routinely apply what it learns to business decisions. The key challenge for enterprises is not just to capture social media data, but to transform it into actionable insights at both the strategic and day-to-day levels. Therefore, it must be aggregated, filtered for relevance and made visible in regular decision-making contexts for people throughout your organization. The ultimate goal is social media intelligence, when social media data is shared openly across departments and fully integrated into business processes. This white paper will define the three stages of the enterprise journey to social media intelligence and highlight how integrating social media across the enterprise with a social relationship platform (SRP) is crucial to success at every stage.

From Data to Decisions

Stage 1: Listening

In the Listening stage, organizations monitor social media to build a greater understanding of their customers, their competitors, and the influential people and forces that shape their industry. Social media listening is typically conducted by individuals or small teams in marketing, PR or communications, but other departments may run their own ad hoc programs. This stage is an opportunity for social media practitioners to gain confidence in measuring their own activities and demonstrate their results. While tracking basic metrics and keywords, practitioners uncover insights from social media data and make recommendations to improve related operations within their departments. For example, practitioners in marketing may identify high-performing keywords that can be applied to search engine optimization or pay- per-click advertising. Typically, these insights are siloed within social media teams or departmental working groups, and are therefore not visible to the broader organization. Listening teams at this stage may experiment with technology which collects “buzz” or general brand sentiment from social media. Such tools provide an overview of the conversation around the brand and its competitors. However, in order to gain a more comprehensive and real-time understanding of what is being said, listeners must employ a social relationship platform. With an SRP, listeners have a single interface through which they can monitor multiple social networks for customer comments, brand mentions and relevant keywords. An SRP also brings other information sources together for listeners to analyze holistically, including listening tools, channel-specific analytics services, and content discovery technologies. Social media listening can quickly prove its worth during a public relations incident. When an organization is on the verge of a brand crisis, the first people to know are usually the practitioners monitoring social media. If they are able to notify people in other teams and departments, the enterprise can efficiently respond and take control of the situation.


Stage 2: Engaging

In the Engaging stage, departmental teams start to follow up social media listening with action. They continue to analyze brand sentiment with SRPs, but now work proactively to address customer inquiries or complaints. They conduct two-way communications on social channels, building relationships with customers, sales prospects and brand ambassadors. Integrating social media into customer service, sales and influencer marketing are all indications that an organization has reached the Engaging stage. As teams transition from passive social media listening to active engagement, the use of a comprehensive social relationship platform is crucial. An SRP allows teams to collaboratively monitor and respond to inbound messages on multiple channels. It also combines outbound publishing and analytics into one system, enabling teams to analyze social media signals within the context of their own engagement efforts. Therefore, information gathered at this stage is much more meaningful and actionable. Over the course of the Engaging stage, each department’s social media tactics become increasingly data-driven and centered on business objectives. For example, marketers connect social media to web analytics, helping them to refine their campaign messaging and demographic targeting to increase lead generation and deliver measurable ROI. Departmental social media programs inevitably capture qualitative and quantitative data that can be greatly beneficial to other areas of the enterprise. They collect product feedback, customer data and competitive intelligence that typically does not get disseminated to Market Research, Business Intelligence, and Product Research & Development who could apply the data to strategic decisions. This information will remain inaccessible until the enterprise develops effective mechanisms for sharing it across departments.


Stage 3: Intelligence

As the enterprise progresses into the Intelligence stage, social media data becomes visible throughout the organization. This information is no longer “owned” by social media teams, but treated as a strategic resource for the whole enterprise. Information gathered from social media starts to influence campaign objectives, sales projections and resource allocation. Consequently, social media KPIs are incorporated into business planning and reviewed regularly alongside other indicators to evaluate strategies. In order to support executive decisions, departmental teams routinely disseminate their insights and demonstrate the results of their activities. They can automatically generate custom reports and dispatch them to stakeholders, while command center displays provide organization-wide visibility of campaign performance and the voice of the customer from social channels.


Building a Customer-Centric Organization

Today’s customers expect to move between different digital touch points without waiting for companies to catch up. Therefore, enterprises must work to create a unified brand experience on every social channel, all the time. By sharing data across departments and between tools, they can work as a single organization to communicate with customers, influencers and brand advocates. Successful enterprises engage at scale, continuously applying social media intelligence to countless interactions. For people in every business function to fully leverage customer insights from social media, the SRP should connect seamlessly with CRM, helpdesk and other business tools that employees use on a daily basis. This puts social media data into context for on-the-fly decisions, so customer-centric behavior becomes the norm. When customer intelligence from social media is made visible in CRM records, for example, sales representatives can routinely access it throughout their sales process to gain introductions, build relationships, and close deals. To broadly empower the workforce with social media intelligence, an organization needs straightforward policies, educated employees, and a social relationship platform which is as approachable to part-time users as it is to full-time social media managers. Everyone must understand how they can and cannot use social media data, especially in regards to customer privacy and regulatory compliance. Standardizing on one SRP with the appropriate safety nets of education, training and guidance ensures that overall goals are met without incident. Once social media intelligence becomes accessible across the enterprise, people begin to apply it in unanticipated ways toward business goals. Ultimately, social media intelligence requires a managed convergence of public social media channels and the enterprise’s internal “social business” initiatives. Employees listen and respond to customers on public channels, then pull their ideas into discussions internally. These ideas spark mass collaboration over the company’s internal social network, private Facebook groups, employee blogs, wikis and other platforms. The virtuous cycle of listening, engagement and intelligence continues

How Social Media is Changing Customer Service

Businesses have been relatively quick to adopt social media for marketing and public relations, but have been slower in realizing its role as a hub for customer support and maintaining customer relationships.

While the concept of social service is not new, too few organizations have truly harnessed the power of social customer service, even though nearly a third of tweets to brands are support-related. Social media is slowly taking more of the workload historically reserved for email and telephone and is being used for everything from product evangelism to sales inquiries and support requests. Social channels are becoming more and more favored as a communication channel of choice by consumers. Twitter, Facebook and mobile technologies give consumers the easiest, most direct approach for support, but it’s the one businesses are least prepared to handle.

In fact, a variety of studies have found that somewhere between 25-55% of customer service inquiries on Facebook and Twitter go completely ignored. In a recent American Express survey 1 , social media savvy consumers reported that they’d spend 21% more with a business that delivered great service, compared to the general population at 13%. What’s more is that these consumers were also three times as likely to share positive service experiences than the average customer.

Is your business leaving money (and loyalty) on the table by ignoring customers’ comments and issues on the web? Knowing how to use social media channels to provide answers can help your company gain valuable feedback, build customer loyalty and drive sales. But how does a business effectively use social media for customer support? And what factors should be considered when starting out?


Build a Team of Brand Advocates

The single most important part of using social media for customer service is to choose passionate, considerate people and train them thoroughly with social media tools. They will be interacting with everyone from current and potential customers to online influencers. Trusting in their ability to respond in a timely and appropriate manner is paramount to your company’s social media success. While social media doesn’t fit neatly into one department, it’s important to choose people who are passionate about the customer to handle your company’s support channels. Look to leverage the customer service team you currently have in place.

Using a social media management tool to organize your social accounts and team member tasks can help ensure that each comment is handled properly. Your social media team will be able to monitor brand mentions, review conversation histories between customers and the brand, and seamlessly manage support tickets from one platform. Take advantage of the opportunity to connect personally with consumers, turning the casual customer into a loyal brand advocate.

Ensure Your Social Team Is Equipped to Solve Problems

Social Media is an unprecedented opportunity to deliver great service, but it is also a potential source of frustration for your customers if the team manning your social media accounts is not equipped or able to solve problems.

Just as consumers have grown impatient with phone trees and hold time, there is growing frustration when requests for help through social media are met with an initial response but nothing further. The pitfall here is that these individuals have already proven to be vocal in their need for assistance, and getting the run-around can quickly turn them against you.

A common approach to social media is to put marketing and PR professionals behind the wheel, which may be the right choice, but if they are not equipped to solve problems, the efforts can do more harm than good. More important than having all the answers is being able to incite action in your organization to drive the issue toward resolution.

Your team should be equally versed in quick response, empathy and follow-through and possess the authority to get resolution for your customers. Customers have increasing expectations of social support and given the advantages technology provides, business should strive to make this the most efficient support channel available. Social media is already the most convenient channel of communication for customers, and the volume and importance of this channel will only increase.


Put the Social in Social Media

When it comes to social media, organizations tend to focus on the message rather than the relationship. As Frank Eliason noted in @YourService, social media is “an incredibly personal space built with human connections.” So give your social media team the opportunity to inject their personality into responses and interactions with customers. Your clients will not only get the help they need, but know that someone is genuinely listening and responding to their concerns.

Additionally, communication shouldn’t be one-sided. If your customers take the time to reach out, make sure your team returns the favor and responds – even if it’s just to say thank you. Take a look at Zappos.com’s Twitter page for examples of personable responses to customer comments. Tweets by customers, whether positive or negative, are met with a response. A satisfied customer posted, “I love zappos.com! One day shipping for free!” Minutes later, a Zappos team member responded with, “Isn’t that the greatest? We love you, too!” Taking the time to just say thank you or share in the excitement of your customers’ positive experiences can help your customer service go from expected to exceptional. Monitoring brand mentions and industry keywords is another great way to show your customers that you’re listening and available to help.

As illustrated in the example above, Zappos not only replied to a customer’s tweet, but did so even though the user hadn’t directly tagged them in the message. By being proactive and playful, the company was able to connect with the customer, by focusing on the person, not the sales pitch.

It’s important that your chosen tools also maintain a record of interaction so your social team has the context and history needed to effectively help the customer. Your team should have access to past conversations and know exactly who on your team has interacted with the customer. Having access to this context and knowledge of all responses is essential to avoid making customers repeat themselves or feel like they are dealing with robots. Everyone loves being remembered and social technology gives us an opportunity for 100% recall of past interactions, which when coupled with empathy and personality, can make for an excellent support experience.


Engage Publicly and Promptly

While there’s no way to control what people say about your company, simply ignoring a customer will not solve the problem or make it disappear. Would you turn your back toward a customer who walked into your store or hang up on them if they called? Unlikely. Social media should be no different.


"According to a recent report, 25% of social media users expect a response from a brand within one hour, while 6% expect one within 10 minutes."


No company is immune to dissatisfied customers, but the way in which unflattering reviews or critical comments are handled – especially online – can be the differentiator between a small blip on the radar and a social media crisis. There will be times that a customer posts negative comments about your company, no matter how much you’ve gone out of your way to try to help them. The key to keeping this under control is to show that you’re listening and responding in a professional, helpful and friendly way.

By quickly and publicly replying to negative comments online, you can help illustrate to other customers that your organization is committed to excellent service. In a recent STELLAService study of the top 25 online retailers, only 44% of customer service questions asked were replied to within 24 hours. Take advantage of this opportunity to not only ‘WOW’ your customers, but also outdo your competition. Conversation history allowed for seamless communication with a customer over a two month period.

Using a social media management tool with help desk features can also assist in handling these types of situations. The right tool can allow your social team to stay up-to-date with known support issues and task online posts to appropriate team members or departments for immediate resolution. In addition, service representatives will be able to review comprehensive customer history profiles to avoid duplicate questions - all from within one dashboard.


Setting Expectations

The worst thing a brand can do in terms of social media is to ignore all comments and questions that come in through established social channels. Social media is “open” seven days a week, 365 days a year, and customers expect businesses to be available around-the-clock to provide real-time customer support.

While this isn’t feasible for all businesses, providing other ways to get help (e.g. a customer support email address, phone number, or forum) and posting when social accounts will be staffed can give customers realistic expectations about response time. Though not all customers check feeds before messaging a business, being upfront about when you’ll be online can illustrate that your business is making every effort to provide service.

If negative comments filling your company’s Twitter profile are a concern, creating a separate customer support profile can be an easy solution. By using a different Twitter account to handle questions or complaints, your customers will also get the answers they need as well as know where to go for the most timely and helpful answers should future cases arise.


Know When to Take It Offline

Social media is best used for simple customer service questions. Since many customer service questions and answers are personal in nature, identify which types of questions, issues, and concerns should be taken offline.


“handle every complaint delicately, but always respond publicly.” – Jamie Lynn Morgan


This allows the company to assist the upset customer in the best way possible, without filling social profiles with negative comments, while still showing other customers that the brand is responsive.

Delta Airlines has a few standard tweets that are used to lead conversations offline. Scroll through the @DeltaAssist timeline and you’ll likely find posts that say, “Let me see what I can do. Can you DM the confirmation code?” or tweets that direct people to specific phone numbers to get help from different Delta departments.

Trying to direct a customer to resolve an issue offline is a great way to reduce the amount of negative or unfavorable comments about your company online. However, it’s important to assist customers as best you can online, if that’s the platform in which they feel most comfortable communicating.


Everyone is an Influencer

For as long as there have been ways to measure someone’s online “influence”, brands have focused at least part of their efforts on keeping the influential customers happy. While this can’t hurt, it’s increasingly important that this strategy not come at the expense of everyone else.

Social Media influence measurement is not an exact science, and offline and online influence do not correlate directly. Allowing your social team to make assumptions about someone’s worth to your company based on these measures can be very problematic.

While keeping people with a loud online “voice” happy is a good idea, any attempts at prioritization should consider the value a person represents as a customer first, and online influencer second. The best rule of thumb is to treat everyone like an influencer, secret shopper, or “Undercover Boss”. Give everyone an exceptional experience.

Chances are your influential customers do not significantly outspend the less socially celebrated, so the cost of losing either is high, but collectively we do not act accordingly.


Summary

When developing your digital strategy, incorporating a strong social media team and putting processes in place to handle delicate situations is a necessity. You want to ensure you are giving your customers a reason to be brand advocates. Here are some key points to make sure your company stands out from the competition when it comes to using social media for customer support:

Train your team.
Make sure they are brand advocates themselves, they know how to respond to customer inquiries, and they have the necessary resources to solve problems.

Use the right tools.
A social media management tool with help desk integration will ensure that your team is well organized, aware of every mention, and has the right resources to respond.

Respond promptly.
While some inquiries require more research than others, let your customers know you’re looking into an issue. Leave those lines of communication open, rather than keep your customers guessing.

Be human.
The true power of social media lies in the fact that consumers can have closer interactions with businesses. Your team’s personalities will be your greatest asset. Your customers will respond best when they know they’re talking to a real person. Treat everyone like an online influencer. Give all of your current and potential customers exceptional service, regardless of online scores of influence.

Social media presents an incredible opportunity to connect with customers on a level never seen before. Customers will only continue to use social media as a customer support platform and you need to make sure your business is prepared to handle it.

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