Increasingly, consumers and business professionals are turning to their favorite social channels to give praise, offer feedback, ask questions and post criticism about anything and everything—including, almost certainly, your brand, and the service your organization delivers.
The risks are obvious (just ask United Airlines executives what they thought about Dave Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube videos). But the opportunities are significant, too: with the right strategies and tools in place, customer service organizations can leverage social channels to:
- Significantly increase customer loyalty—by answering questions and solving problems pro-actively, before thing have the chance to turn ugly
- Boost revenues by identifying questions, requests and comments in social channels that signal potential up-sell opportunities
- Enhance brand reputation (and enjoy all the implied benefits that come with it) by visibly—and helpfully—participating in targeted conversations
Contact centers are ideally positioned to serve customers on social channels, and a few preferred practices have already emerged. To get started, follow these four key steps.
Step 1: Develop a Strategy
Start by developing a social mission statement that aligns with your brand’s customer service philosophy and other organizational aims—then use it to inspire a set of more specific social engagement goals.
Next, take your first social engagement goal (e.g., boost up-sell revenue by 15%) and identify the types of social posts you want to respond to—happy, negative, or querying, confused, etc. Lay out the criteria for actionable posts within each of these types (your organization’s customer service philosophy can guide you here). Then define, at least at a high level, how you want to respond.
Good! Now go through all of the remaining social engagement goals you identified in the same way: the kinds of posts will you monitor for, how will you decide whether to respond, and how you want to respond. You’ll get some overlaps – strategies that can serve multiple goals – and you’ll soon have a set of defined, actionable post types and response strategies.
On a parallel track (these efforts inform one another), decide where to watch for actionable posts. Check all the major social outlets and see where consumers are talking about you, or about matters important to your brand. That’s right: a post that doesn’t explicitly tag you may still be relevant. Naturally, though, monitoring for your product, brand and company names is a good place to start.
Start working early on to get buy-in from marketing and PR units. You’ll want to ensure that your “social engagement voice” is consistent across all channels, and is consistent with and complementary to all your organization’s external communications.
Step 2: Identify the Right Team
Because social media is a public channel, you’ll want your top dogs on the job. Identify which of your best-performing customer care agents are socially savvy and know your brand, products, and policies inside and out. That’s your team.
Step 3: Lay out Response Protocols
Don’t ask your new team to keep every strategy and issue scenario in their heads. Create a playbook with guidelines and rules of engagement for your team to follow (use the team to help create it). This tool is essential for ensuring a consistent and cohesive operation. Identify the playbook’s “owner” (you, perhaps?) and treat it as a living document. It absolutely will evolve.
Step 4: Engage... and measure.
You and your team are ready. You know where start monitoring, what to listen for, and how and when you’ll respond. So engage... and be sure to measure everything you can. Tracking and reporting on your efforts will speed progress towards your goals, improve operational efficiency, and deliver a better ROI.
What to measure. Look for ways to tie metrics to your organizational goals, and to the engagement goals in your strategy. Some organizations have found it helpful to track customer sentiment, either over time or by business issue. Tracking comment volume by topic and type can help reveal important trends. Also, consider tracking traffic by customer, to understand how ongoing engagement impacts sales or loyalty.
Finally, track your team’s progress too. Identify performance benchmarks, collect data, and compare agent productivity to increase efficiency and identify areas for process improvement. 
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