Business Tips on Social Care and Social CRM

• There are 5 million active users on Google Plus (source: Google), 140 million active users on Twitter (source: Twitter), and 1 billion active users on Facebook (source: Facebook)
• 47% of social media users have sought customer service via social media sites (source: Nielson McKinsey)
• 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect a response from a company within the same day of posting a complaint or question
• 71% of those who receive positive social care are likely to recommend that company

Social media customer care is here to stay. Increasingly, businesses are heeding the above statistics and implementing a plan for delivering customer service through social media channels. During this process, most companies encounter a common revelation: social media customer care cannot exist in a silo. Inevitably, the social care and customer service teams cross paths. Or social care issues require input from the product team. What’s more – some leading organizations are looking more closely at both their social care analytics and community conversations to guide product, sales, and operations strategies. That’s right: social media customer care is here to stay, and its bursting with data that can be leveraged across all organizations within a company. 

Whether you’re just in the neonate or the deployment stage of your social care strategy, your goal is to deliver excellent service. To take your program to an exceptional level, one which benefits various company departments, your goal should be to integrate social CRM.

Below are guidelines for 1) delivering excellent social care and 2) integrating social CRM.

1) Social Customer Care Tips:

• Prioritize channels
• Establish social care hours and response times
• Define the escalation process

Prioritize channels based on where  customers congregate the most, e.g., you may find Facebook and forums are frequent channels for customer feedback but not Twitter. Depending on available resources, some companies prioritize more channels, some companies fewer.

Then, set the hours when you have someone on duty for those social media channels, e.g., see Verizon Support’s Twitter hours above. To determine your social care hours, chart customer inquiries on social channels by day and hour. Establish a maximum response time — is your business mission critical enough that you should respond within ten minutes during “on” hours, or is a 24-hour response time via social acceptable to your customers?

Next, the escalation process should define ascending levels of support and/or managers and a closed loop for customer resolution. An example scenario could be something like:

A social care manager – trained in tier 1 technical support – responds to customer care inquiries across all social channels. If the issue is highly technical, the social care manager escalates to a designated tier 2 support person. Refund approvals are escalated to an executive. And the team member who resolves the case also closes out the communications with the customer. All of this should be tracked through your CRM platform.

2. Social CRM Tips:

• Log and track social cases through a CRM platform
• Measure and analyze social care metrics
• Distribute social data to relevant organizations within the company

Record all social care cases in your CRM – the same CRM accessed by customer service, product, marketing, and sales. Over time, you should add social profiles to customer CRM records. This will be helpful in understanding customer data in a deeper way – down to the individual’s latest tweet about your company.

In terms of metrics, track the number of social care cases, cases by social channel, resolution times, top inquiries, and issues by product. In addition, track feature requests, customer service experiences, and sales referrals over social media.

Don’t let all that data go to waste. Distribute these metrics regularly to leaders in every department. The report should highlight any trends, positive or negative, that need to be addressed by the relevant department.

Check out my presentation on Social CRM for more information: