What You Need to Know About Social Media for Customer Service
Customer service and IT leaders must understand the impact of the five most popular use cases of social media for customer service to stay relevant and to excel. These include the employee roles, processes and technologies that support them.
- The most popular use cases of social media for customer service are focused on connecting customers to one another versus evaluating customer service operations.
- Social media applications for customer service are typically purchased and used independently of social media applications for marketing, e-commerce and sales.
- Social customer service success is dependent on people across customer service, e-commerce, marketing and sales working together and establishing processes for supporting a unified brand image on social media.
- Assign the necessary people to social media for customer service. Skimping on proper people resources will hinder your company's ability to provide real-time customer service and could have a negative impact on your company's brand.
- Team with social marketing leaders to train your customer service agents on how to develop and protect brand reputation through social customer service.
- Invest in social customer service technologies to help agents queue up social inquires, and to help customer service managers identify areas of success and those in need of improvement.
By 2015, businesses that lack an all-channel customer engagement strategy will lose 15% to 20% of their best customers to competitors that have such a strategy.
Introduction
In 2013, Gartner decided to retire the Magic Quadrant for Social CRM in an effort to more granularly define the social space and its complementary focus on the core CRM disciplines of customer service, e-commerce, marketing and sales. In this research, we will delve into five cases of social media for customer service, commonly cited by our clients in inquiries and at events, along with the organizational roles, processes and technologies that complement them.
The five uses of social media for customer service that we identify in this research are:
- Social media engagement for customer service
- Peer-to-peer community support
- Enterprise social networking for customer service
- Service feedback
- Service process analysis of social customer service
The people, processes and technologies that companies employ for social customer support are deriving complaints, compliments and inquiries from social media sources. The most popular social media sources for customer service organizations in 2013 are:
- Peer-to-peer communities, including forums
- Review sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp (specifically for companies in hospitality and retail)
- Sina Weibo (specifically in China)
- YouTube
Social media technology investments for the support of customer service are prevalent across various industries. Figure 1 provides a snapshot of overall technology investment by industry.
Figure 1. Social for Customer Service Technology Investment by Industry
CPG: consumer packaged goods. Percentages have been rounded.
Source: Gartner (September 2013)
Social media engagement for customer service involves customer service agents using social media monitoring and response tools to handle inquiries and complaints raised on popular social networks, forums and blogs in a linear, case-by-case manner. Companies starting out with this use case usually begin by engaging directly through a social media site, going directly to Twitter or Facebook to view inquiries and respond. More-mature organizations use a more case-centric approach and leverage processes and technologies to focus on customer histories and conversation threads.
Social media engagement for customer service is less about reducing case volume or interaction time and more about increasing customer satisfaction by engaging with clients on their medium of choice. It's often proactive rather than reactive – with companies needing to run searches on various social sites for mentions of their brand names and associated complaints. Companies in the retail, telecommunications, transportation, hospitality and financial services industries are most heavily invested in social media engagement for customer service. American Express, Orange and United Airlines all have social customer service programs.
People
- Social customer service agents use social media engagement to conduct customer service interactions with customers on their platform of choice, ensuring that companies don't miss out on opportunities to improve customer satisfaction by solving issues that may or may not have hit the traditional call center.
- Traditional customer service agents use social media engagement to engage in social conversations that can be aligned with traditional customer profiles and conversation histories, and get closer to a 360-degree view of the customer.
- Brand marketing managers leverage social media engagement for customer service as a new vehicle for maintaining and protecting brand reputation.
Process
- Anticipate social inquiry volume. Watch social media feeds and anticipate the resources that will be needed to fulfill social engagement requirements for customer service.
- Aggregate social posts. Queue up social posts to make responding to incoming inquiries more mechanical versus ad hoc.
- Develop a means for prioritizing and assigning social posts. Whether this is automated or manual, social-media-based inquiries need to be prioritized and assigned just as traditional customer service inquiries are. Prioritization may need to take into account things like Klout Score or social influence to mitigate the risk of social complaints going viral.
- Determine customer-service-level standards. Social customer service should be near real time, and expectations for response are within one hour. Still, the faster the response, the greater the opportunity to increase customer satisfaction.
- Advise against total automation. 99% of social media posts are public, so response templates need to be tweaked so that customers aren't seeing that responses are automated, but instead that social service channels are supported by humans.
- Plan to take conversations offline. Ensure customers know not to share private information, including account information, over public channels. Instead, develop a multichannel escalation plan for taking conversations offline.
- Integrate with legacy customer records. Social conversation and customer histories shouldn't be independent of legacy customer records, but should supplement legacy records to get closer to a 360-degree view of the customer.
Technology
Social media engagement systems for customer service must be able to provide:
- A mechanism for aggregating social media posts from whichever sources a company deems most important
- The ability to assign posts and create filtered queues so that subject matter experts can quickly identify posts that they're responsible for and omit social media noise, which can delay their response times.
- Prioritization functionality to elevate posts from high-spend clients and social media influencers to retain big business and prevent complaints from going viral.
- Case profiles to store customer bios and conversation histories.
- Community managers are the primary caretakers of the community, moderating conversations, encouraging new ideas, and liaising between community members and the business.
- Community administrators are responsible for the nuts and bolts of a community, managing duplicate forums, establishing a participatory rewards system, and permitting different levels of access for employees and superusers.
- IT leaders supporting CRM are responsible for integrating individual customer insights extracted from the community into legacy customer records.
- Decide whether a new destination must be created. For some organizations, leveraging existing resources (such as a company Facebook page or public Twitter and forum feeds) may be a viable option. For others, on-website communities might be a better approach.
- Build forums that correlate to FAQ topics. Many visitors to your community site will find it through a search engine. Be sure to clearly label your forums as your customers would be most inclined to search for the topics, to improve search engine optimization (SEO).
- Communicate your community's purpose and existence. No matter how good your community is, if no one knows it exists or what it's for, no one will visit it.
- Give community visitors clear action items. When visitors land on your community page, their available actions should be clear. If you provide visitors with an open environment, free of direction, then many visitors will feel overwhelmed and leave your site.
- Manage and moderate with a light hand. If your objective for the community is to allow for peer-to-peer engagement, then provide customers and partners with a space where they can share freely and, for the most part, uncensored.
- Establish community guidelines and grounds for member removal. Removing members from the community should be a last resort. Establish guidelines and a code of conduct for community members, as well as a warning system for members who are negatively impacting community enablement.
- Develop a continuous engagement plan. This could include everything from gamified approaches of badging and leaderboards to exclusive access for active members.
- Collaborate with Marketing and Product Development. Be sure community branding is consistent with company branding. Hand off community insights to product development for potential incorporation into future product or service releases.
- Integrate community insights with legacy customer records and insights. IT and customer service need to work together to ensure that customer insights are captured and stored in legacy customer records, and that community insights are an input in an overall business intelligence schema.
- A means for content creation and curation, which includes rich media publishing capabilities; the provision of forums, wikis, blogs, file sharing and storage; and voting tools, among other company-specific criteria
- Knowledge management for seamless access to the corporate knowledge repository for self-service, as well as the ability to add community knowledge to the corporate knowledge repository.
- Member management capabilities to allow members to create profiles, allow companies to establish customer records, and motivate contribution and engagement.
- An agile platform for community accessibility via multiple devices, such as smartphones and tablets, customizable skinning and templates, a developer API to extend the community application, and the ability to integrate with legacy applications through communicable APIs.
- IT leaders supporting CRM are responsible for identifying the appropriate social software to complement the customer service organization's objectives and integrating the software with legacy applications.
- Customer service agents handle the day-to-day engagement with one another via the enterprise social network, and will use it to decrease time to solution.
- Knowledge management leaders aggregate similar tribal knowledge articles being created throughout the enterprise social network to turn them into corporate knowledge articles and cut down on the resources needed for original content creation.
- Determine whether enterprise social networking solutions are already in use in your organization. Opportunities may exist to leverage enterprise social networking tools already being used by HR or sales.
- Identify parties needing primary access to the enterprise social network. When rolling out an enterprise social network, it is important to keep the solution pointed and controlled so that kinks can be worked through and processes can be solidified before expanding beyond the customer service organization.
- Explicitly explain the purpose of the enterprise social network to customer service agents and subject matter experts. Similar to peer-to-peer customer communities, internal enterprise social networks need to provide visitors with clear direction.
- Contextualize content. This may be something technology allows for, and it may be something that your agents or knowledge workers need to do manually by tagging all content they post.
- Formalize content by creating knowledge articles. The aggregation of tribal knowledge into formal knowledge articles can save knowledge management leaders time and resources by simply cleaning up existing information.
- Maintain profiles to capture and display information about individual participants. Profiles reflect the verified identify of the user and may include background, interests, history of activities, etc.
- Create aggregate activity streams for a chronological list of posts that people, applications or the tool itself injects into the stream. These posts relate to people, groups, topics or events.
- Create and curate content so that users can share files, articles, documents in different formats, and rich media content that is either created within the social network (e.g., with blogs, wikis or rich editors) or created elsewhere, but uploaded/shared via the network.
- Develop groups so that agents with similar expertise and subject matter experts can service specific areas.
- Provide access control to restrict access, monitor usage, create isolated subnetworks, integrate with existing identity management systems, etc.
- Be embedded within legacy applications to support legacy customer service activity.
- Customer service managers review service feedback to prepare agents for anticipated influxes of inquires around a specific topic.
- Product development managers review service feedback for ways to improve product or service offerings.
- Chief customer officers include social-media-based service feedback in their overall evaluations of customer satisfaction, incorporating additional enterprise feedback management channels.
- Identify the questions you're trying to answer via unstructured service feedback. Analyzing social data without a clear objective will leave your organization with a big data problem versus big data insight.
- Develop a communications plan for soliciting structured feedback via social channels. Customers on social media won't like being constantly bombarded with surveys and questionnaires, and may not be willing to complete them. Instead, provide agents with guidance on the characteristics of a social media exchange that call for the solicitation of structured feedback.
- Evaluate social-media-based service feedback in parallel with traditional service feedback. Recognize the difference in responses based on content and sentiment, and attempt to normalize all data.
- Aggregate information sources like Facebook, Twitter, communities, review sites, forums, blogs and traditional Web search so that information can be paralleled and analyzed.
- Store structured feedback forms and responses for distribution to constituents and consumption by the organization.
- Export social-media-specific service feedback into legacy enterprise feedback management applications for broader evaluation.
- Customer service managers use service process analysis to identify areas of improvement across agent teams and for individual agents.
- Chief customer officers like to see service process analysis to both determine and communicate service agreements for customers engaging with their businesses on social media.
- Determine KPIs for social customer service success. In order to evaluate progression and success, it is critical that KPIs that align to business objectives are determined prior to making any technology or process decisions.
- Measure agents in comparison to their peers, as well as on an individual historical basis. The best way to improve is to determine what team and individual benchmarks should realistically look like, and to work to optimize the customer service team based on what is possible.
- Analyze social data as one component of your overall service process analysis strategy. Line up social analysis against traditional analysis and use it as a key input in decision making, versus the only input for decision making.
- Identify conversation threads occurring on Facebook, Twitter, communities, review sites, forums, blogs and traditional Web search, so that conversations and cases can be analyzed from first contact through to resolution.
- Analyze interactions by agent so that managers can optimize resources to best deliver on service agreements.
- Report on and visualize the data for consumption by upper management and management.
- Send alerts and notifications when topics accelerate or decelerate in volume, indicative of opportunities or crises. Sample vendors include Engagor, LiveOps, SAP, SoCoCare and Visible Technologies.
Sample vendors include Conversocial, Lithium, Parature, SoCoCare and Zendesk.
Customer service leaders look to peer-to-peer communities as a way for customers and partners to blog, post, rate products/services and construct cases, as well as to enable peer interaction and knowledge management. Peer-to-peer communities are often an area of overlap for customer service and marketing, with marketing historically making the initial community investment and turning over community management to customer service. Ideally, customers and partners engage on a peer-to-peer basis to develop communities, but companies need to plan for the role they will initially play in building, communicating about and organizing community content.
By building a library of ideas, common problems, solution sets and participant profiles, this form of social customer support can lead to substantial case deflection and call deflection. Peer-to-peer communities for customer support are heavily utilized by companies in the telecommunications, high tech, IT, retail, financial services and consumer goods industries. Cox Communications, Ford and La Caixa have peer-to-peer communities for customer support.
People
Process
Technology
Technologies supporting peer-to-peer communities for customer support require:
Sample vendors include Get Satisfaction, Jive, Lithium, Oracle and Telligent.
Enterprise social networking for customer service refers to customer service agents' internal collaboration around a case, a set of cases or a customer record. Enterprise social networking capabilities for customer service should be embedded within a CRM application. This internal community functionality can lower support costs through the ability to identify a network of experts outside an agent's individual network, and the use of crowdsourced identification of solutions.
Enterprise social networking for customer service commands high interest, but has been limited in terms of the number of companies actually executing on such strategies. Customer service organizations are struggling with learning and prioritizing social approaches, and we believe enterprise social networking for customer service is something that will become more popular across industries in eight months to two years. It is currently popular in B2B companies in the financial services, manufacturing, professional services and telecommunications industries. Companies such as GE, T-Mobile and Unilever are leading the way into this new territory.
People
Process
Technology
Technologies supporting enterprise social networking for customer service require the ability to:
Sample vendors include IBM, Jive, Oracle, salesforce.com and SugarCRM.
Customer service leaders use service feedback over social media for member interaction, surveys, forums and polling. Social-media-based feedback can be gathered in two ways. The first is through the application of social media analytics to identify unstructured responses to questions a business might have about its products or services. The second way is by placing structure around the unstructured – for example, by leveraging review site feedback, or sending a link to a survey or poll after a customer issues a complaint over social media.
Service feedback is popular in industries such as transportation, financial services, hospitality and retail, but it still does not have a lot of traction. Only 2% of Gartner's nearly 700 end-user cases of social for CRM are service feedback cases. Companies that have broken ground in this space include Ally Financial, Best Western International and Gold's Gym.
People
Process
Technology
Service feedback applications must be able to:
Sample vendors include Clarabridge, Medallia, Nice Systems, QuestBack and Vision Critical.
Service process analysis of social-media-based customer service sees organizations using analytical tools to pinpoint the precise area where a customer service process falls short, and the factors that caused inadequate support of the customer. Service process analysis is used in conjunction with other social media use cases, such as social media engagement for customer service or peer-to-per community support.
This type of analysis is very specific to customer service, and is used by some organizations that are executing on social media engagement and peer-to-peer community strategies; however, there is room for major growth in this use case as companies mature in their social customer service and analytics strategies. Organizations in financial services, retail and professional services are paving the way, and companies such as Danone, FedEx and Hertz are utilizing service process analysis to optimize their social customer service strategies.
People
Process
Technology
Technologies that support service process analysis offer capabilities that allow them to:
Today, most clients use anywhere from two to five social media applications for customer service that are not technologically integrated, but are cohesive because of the processes that have been put around them. Clients are telling us that point solutions are still superior to suite solutions, so they work to integrate point solutions with their legacy customer service offerings.
Moving forward, customers will move toward the customer engagement center – an evolution of the contact center that can handle multichannel support, including everything from traditional phone calls and emails to Web chat to mobile and social customer service. As this evolution takes place, we expect to see customers managing multiple use cases via an integrated customer service platform.
Source: Gartner Research Note G00252494, Michael Maoz, Jenny Sussin, 12 September 2013
