Prepare your teams to deliver a top-notch social media experience
Given the social media and ecommerce growth that took place in 2020, there is a greater need for brands to properly structure customer service around social media platforms.
While many brands already have teams for handling messages from customers on social platforms, companies struggle to find the best way to manage great customer interactions while meeting new or existing productivity KPIs.
Organize Representatives for Success Based on Volume
Customer service teams that conduct conversations over social channels should be flexible in their availability to respond. Teams can multitask when volumes are low, and have the benefit of leveraging specialized talent for a higher quality output. Companies should also prioritize tracking volume patterns on social channels to aid in forecasting and scheduling customer service teams.
For lower volumes, companies should prioritize staffing in accordance with opening hours and target response time. When scheduling staff, brands should recognize the rising customer expectations around response times — 80% of companies respond within 24 hours, but 85% of customers expect a response within six hours. Teams also deal with high volumes of ‘noise’ (messages that don’t require a response but must be tagged). Many social media enterprise solutions offer automatic routing and tagging options that pre-filter messages. Spam is filtered out and messages that require a response are routed to the response team, which boosts productivity.
Form a Competent Social Media Customer Service Team
The best performers on the customer service team aren’t necessarily the best fit for the social media customer service team. While some skills are universal, social media customer service teams require unique attributes for helping customers on digital platforms. Emphatic, proactive, and creative representatives with an ability to manage time are good qualities for team members. They should also be passionate about engaging on social media and understand different types of users, cultural references, and current trends.
Regional and subjective language understanding is crucial on social media. When a representative doesn’t understand a certain tone, it can have an impact on customer relations. Team members that speak the language but haven’t actually lived in the country they are servicing will need additional cultural training and guidance from a cultural native.
Measurable Social Media Indicators
Tracking specific indicators are important to help determine success in meeting social media goals. Here are four key areas professionals must be aware of:
- Brand awareness: Follower growth, engagement, and reach. All of these are critical success metrics.
- Brand reputation: Response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and sentiment.
- Brand loyalty: Following conversations about your brand, engagement and CSAT.
- Conversion: Monitored by follower growth and conversion rates.
There are also KPIs that determine if customer service teams are able to fulfill customer expectations and provide quality interactions. Those productivity KPIs include: first response time, average response time and case resolution time. Lastly, brands should keep a pulse on customer experience KPIs including customer sentiment change, CSAT, engagement per interaction and conversion rate.
Social media teams are first responders for direct, public customer feedback. Open communication, adequate staffing, and insightful scheduling will prepare them for rapid response, and the company for long-term success for years to come.
This topic was recently explored by Estelle Wienk, Global Research and Solutions Manager at Majorel in a piece entitled, “How to prepare customer service teams to deliver a top-notch social media experience in 2021” for CrmXchange.
