A Sea Change in Customer Habits
The magnitude of the social media phenomenon and of how consumer habits are changing is hard to overstate.
Put simply, social media is reshaping the customer journey. For this reason, it is of capital importance to achieve customer engagement beyond the web site and the call center.
However, social media was not originally conceived with enterprise customer care processes in mind. To make a success of your social customer care efforts, be on the lookout for the following points:
7 Rules of Thumb for Achieving Social Customer Care Transformation
1 Identify the venues where the social customer is present
Identify the places where your customers are present. Your social media mix needs to be relevant to their habits and hangouts. Take the customer as the starting point and fit your strategy around it.
2 Draw up your engagement rules
This means drafting and refining guidelines for customer service agents and community managers. Tone of voice is important. Being helpful and timely, even more so. Make sure you provide training.
3 Define simple rules for effectiveness and the metrics to measure it
Are customers more or less satisfied compared to other channels? Are you being effective? Efficient? What about response times. Make sure you know what and why you want to measure before setting out.
4 Keep it under control! Keep it data driven
Once you have defined your objectives, make sure you have all the actionable metrics you need in one place to guide your decisions.
5 Make sure the different departments and teams are on the same page
A sensible dose of change management is good to make sure this happens. A shared playbook and mutually agreed upon service levels, and of course keeping it on the agenda is the best way to make sure this happens.
6 Know who the project sponsors are within Customer Care
And make sure you are looking for the right skills when hiring. It’s still about customer service but written skills, knowledge of social media and willingness to embrace change are key when selecting social customer service agents.
7 Put training into place and follow up regularly…
Rome wasn’t built in a day. And your customer service agents won’t become social CSAs in a week. Sharing best practices and keeping skills for channels and tools up to date is an ongoing process.
Ready for social CRM change? Lets go!
Originally published Mar 18, 2016, updated Dec 30, 2022
