social media monitoring for customer serviceoursocialtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/...and...

How to create your customer service listening programme

Social Media Monitoring for Customer Service

In association with

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BACKGROUNDIn January 2013 Our Social Times hosted a webinar on the topic of Social Media Monitoring for Customer Service. The webinar was hosted by Our Social Times CEO, Luke Brynley-Jones and featured Ronan Gillen, EU Social Customer Service Manager at eBay, Katy Howell, CEO of UK social media agency, Immediate Future, and Leon Chaddock, CEO of social media monitoring and engagement platform, Sentiment.

This report takes the structure of that webinar discussion, as well as verbatim quotes, and elaborates on many of the points raised, with references and additional information subsequently supplied by the speakers. It is not intended to be the ‘last word’ on social media monitoring for customer service, but a useful set of insights and guidance for customer service and social media practitioners who are grappling with the challenges we highlighted in the webinar. We hope you find it useful.

You can hear the original webinar here: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/451637183

Our Social Times is a respected social media agency that provides high-value social media strategy, marketing, management and monitoring services for a wide selection of clients including The Telegraph Media Group, Orange Business Services and Mecca Bingo. Founded by one of the UK’s most experienced social media consultants, Luke Brynley-Jones, Our Social Times also hosts innovative social media conferences and training workshops in the UK, US, Europe and Asia.

For more information visit oursocialtimes.com

To gain real value and ROI from the opportunities presented by the social web, leading businesses are thinking beyond “social” being just the gathering of high level analytics on the one hand or purely having a Twitter or Facebook page on the other. Sentiment helps these businesses become truly social by utilising the 3 main pillars of its Cloud platform, customer insight, social customer service and lead generation. Since its inception in 2005 as one of the pioneers of social media monitoring, Sentiment is now empowering its clients with the latest evolution in enterprise-grade social customer engagement.

For more information visit sentimentmetrics.com

https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/451637183

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CONTENTS

Introduction: The Rise of Social Customer Service ............................................................................... 4

The Challenge of monitoring for customer service .............................................................................. 5

Setting up your monitoring programme ............................................................................................... 6

Selecting your channels ........................................................................................................................ 6

Choosing your monitoring platform ..................................................................................................... 7

Setting up your listening programme ................................................................................................... 8

International monitoring teams ........................................................................................................... 9

Managing your monitoring programme ............................................................................................... 9

Meeting customer expectations ......................................................................................................... 11

Key monitoring features ..................................................................................................................... 12

Preventing and managing crises ......................................................................................................... 14

Gaining customer insight .................................................................................................................... 15

A final word ........................................................................................................................................ 16

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INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

“We’re seeing an evolution. We’re no longer there to support marketing: Customer Service is there as a specific channel dedicated to helping customers to resolve their problems. We don’t always like what we hear - but as long as we can make that customer’s experience better, that’s what we want”.Ronan Gillen, EU Social Customer Service Manager, eBay

Ever since Twitter reached critical mass in 2007/8, the number of people engaging in public conversations with and about brands has increased year-on-year. Inevitably, the first internal teams to pick up on social media monitoring were PR/Communications – for which monitoring offered an early warning system to crises – and Marketing, initially for market insights, but then for outreach and engagement. Yet it’s customers who have led the way:• 50% of customers are now actively using social

media for customer service• 81% of Twitter users expect a same day response

to questions and complaints• 88% of consumers are less likely to buy from

companies ignoring social complaints• 90% of upset customers can be retained with

great customer service1

As a reaction to this growing demand, Customer Service Teams are taking to social media and, in particular, social media monitoring. According to

1 Statistics from Conversocial: http://www.conversocial.com/why

Leon Chaddock, CEO of UK-monitoring platform, Sentiment: “Monitoring has always been focused on PR and Marketing. Four years ago we added an engagement feature to our platform, but there wasn’t much demand. Today, though, brands are demanding it. A standard tool is great for charts and trends and understanding what’s going on, but it’s not the ideal place for customer service. As a result - we’ve had to radically shift our focus”.

This is the same for all of the more sophisticated social media monitoring solutions. The monitoring industry, once heavily research-focused and data-heavy, is currently evolving towards one that combines social media listening with customer engagement, and offers aspects of social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM).

Leon Chaddock, CEO, Sentiment

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In spite of the enthusiasm with which many brands are beginning to monitor social media and engage with their customers, the results for Social Customer Service to date appear shaky. A recent report2 highlighted the few stand-out examples of best practice: UK clothing store Next responds to 93% of customer queries posted to Facebook, against an industry average of 55%, while Vodafone replies to 77% of Twitter complaints, against an industry average of just 32%.

Similarly, when compared to telephone response times in the UK, which average 2 minutes, brand responses on social media seem almost glacial: 357 minutes on Twitter and 819 on Facebook. It’s clear that there is some way to go before Social Customer Service achieves the vision of universal, real-time customer satisfaction that is sometimes ascribed to it.

While we hope to provide some insight into the future of Social Customer Service, the primary purpose of this report is to describe the drivers of the social media monitoring evolution, the opportunities that exist for brands that engage in monitoring – and, conversely, the risks of failing to do so - and the key steps that organisations need to take to start effectively monitoring social media for customer service.

2 http://sociallydevoted.socialbakers.com/

THE CHALLENGE OF MONITORING FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE

“We began to realize that customers have questions that Marketing and Communications aren’t the right people to answer. They wouldn’t have the skills, or the knowledge of policy or processes. We were missing conversations. We wanted to make sure we were there for our customers. Wherever they were having conversations, we wanted to be there.”Ronan Gillen, EU Social Customer Service Manager, eBay

As the use of social media has filtered out across organisations, different management structures have emerged. Most large organisations have now developed some form of Strategy Committee, which involves multiple departments feeding in requirements and then collaborating closely on delivery. In spite of this, the listening capability and crucially, budget, has often been retained within the control of the Marketing or Communications Departments.

That set-up poses inevitable challenges, As Katy Howell, CEO of UK-based social media agency, Immediate Future, explains: “Marketing and Communications don’t always have access to the customer database, which causes problems when they’re responding to queries picked up through social media monitoring. When did the purchase happen? Is the customer in warranty? These are common questions and Customer Service can handle

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these enquiries so much better than them. They just need the right tools at their disposal”.

Yet, in organisations that do open up social media monitoring to Customer Service Teams, there are also challenges. Katy Howell continues: “Here we have a new problem: Customer Service teams have always conducted conversations on a one-to-one or private manner, yet suddenly their conversations can be happening in public. This is a whole new challenge. There’s also the issue that, when you’ve only got 140 characters, you have to be able to write effectively. It requires a whole new skill-set and, often, re-training”.Opening up social media monitoring to multiple departments also raises issues around how data is stored and how customer queries are managed. What will the work-flow be? Which conversations should take priority? Who will follow-up and ensure each issue is responded to and, subsequently, closed? An organisation might have a very clear set of processes for managing traditional customer service, but integrating a new channel - which is also accessible to other departments - opens the door to a multiplicity of new problems.

SETTING UP YOUR MONITORING PROGRAMME

“The starting point is listening. Bring in as much data as possible so you can draw trends on what people are saying, what channels they’re on, where your organisation needs to be focusing, and whether you have the resources to deal with it”.Leon Chaddock, CEO, Sentiment

SELECTING YOUR CHANNELSA report in 2012 revealed that the average large organisation has 178 social media accounts3. While your organisation may not have quite so many, chances are you already have at least one active Twitter account and a Facebook Page. The question then arises: do you need new accounts to manage your social Customer Service engagement?

There are two common responses to this: either you can set up new accounts/pages to be managed exclusively by Customer Service; or you can have your Customer Service team support the Marketing and PR teams through existing accounts. With the former, you need to make sure that customers are clearly signposted to the correct account, or risk becoming irrelevant. With the latter, nurturing a close relationship between your Marketing/PR teams and Customer Service is essential to success.

3 http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/01/time-to-take-out-the-social-me-dia-trash.html

Katy Howell, CEO, Immediate Future

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The Customer Service team at eBay opted to create its own channel, @askebay. According to Ronan Gillen: “We wouldn’t claim to be able to do the job of the Marketing or PR departments - they have their own skills, such as creating rich content – so we feel that separated accounts makes the most sense”.

CHOOSING YOUR MONITORING PLATFORMThere are reportedly over 400 social media monitoring solutions on the market, yet only perhaps 20 of these are sufficiently robust - in terms of having comprehensive data, a complete suite of monitoring and engagement features, CRM integration and reporting - to base your customer listening programme on. Fewer still have developed features specifically with customer service in mind.

You may already have a social media monitoring tool in place and seek to repurpose this for customer service. Social customer service trainer and author, Martin Hill-Wilson, urges caution with this approach: “PR is likely to have used it as an early warning system. Marketing would have initially used it for market insights, thereafter for outreach and engagement. Does the vendor ‘get’ customer service needs?”

In addition to the platform mindset, their organisations need to consider these questions when selecting a platform: 1. Are you being provided with comprehensive

data? Are there key data sources not included, or charged additionally – e.g. Twitter (known as the ‘fire-hose’).

2. Do you plan to manage the tool completely yourselves or have it configured for you? Unless you have close support from the vendor or their agents, it’s likely you will need in-house analytic and reporting skills.

3. Are you interested in monitoring how customers feel about your brand/products? While sentiment analysis of social media mentions - positive/negative/neutral – is usually only 50% accurate ‘out of the box’, it can be taught through manual correction to achieve up to 70% accuracy. This can be a valuable KPI of customer service success and can be done manually.

4. Do you want to see an indication of how ‘influential’ your customers are? Many monitoring platforms give an indication of the social media popularity of individuals. This is largely based on reach and activity, so can help to identify celebrities and other ‘influencers’.

5. Do you have specific geographical or language requirements? See International Monitoring, below.

Martin Hill-Wilson, Consultant, Brainfood Consulting

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6. Do you require integration with your CRM or customer service channels? Most of the leading monitoring platforms integrate with the key CRM platforms or offer bespoke integration services.

7. Does it offer genuine real-time listening? Most monitoring tools claim to have real-time data, but many only update every 15 minutes and some only receive hourly updates. How timely do you need information?

8. What engagement features do you need? See Managing your Monitoring Programme, below.

9. What are your reporting requirements? Make sure the platform can produce the information you require in the correct format.

10. Will your staff be able to use the platform? Ensure the platform meets the usability levels that your staff requires. If they find it unintuitive or difficult, it probably won’t work in a pressurised customer service environment.

11. What budget are you working to? Professional quality social media monitoring tools range from around $500 per month for self-service tools with limited data, to $100,000 per month for Enterprise level, multi-dashboard managed solutions.

There are specialist agencies and consultants who can advise on the best platform to select, but it’s essential to start out knowing roughly what’s

required. The questions above should enable you to create a shortlist of platforms.

SETTING UP YOUR LISTENING PROGRAMMEOn the face of it, creating a listening programme for Customer Service is no different from creating one for product development, market research or strategy development. As Leon Chaddock of Sentiment explains, “The starting point is listening. Set up the search queries and bring in as much data as possible so you can draw trends on what people are saying, what channels they’re on, where your organisation needs to be focusing, and whether you have the resources to deal with it”.

So what should these search queries comprise? Typical queries would include:• Mentions of the brand or products e.g.

#CompanyName, @CompanyName, Company Name, #ProductName, ProductName.

• Mentions of the brand or products, plus support-related words, e.g. help, assistance, not working, broken, #fail.

• Mentions of the brand or products by specific Facebook or Twitter accounts.

• You might even set up specific known phrases or criticisms. “We search for pejoratives associated with the brand, including some swear words, as well as words we associate with problems that we know are stumbling blocks for our customers, as well as cries for help”, explains eBay’s Ronan Gillen. “It’s an on-going process and you’re always learning and adding new terms”.

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INTERNATIONAL MONITORING TEAMSInternational organisations have to deal with the challenges of differing time-zones, languages, laws and cultures every day. Unfortunately, social media monitoring offers no respite from these challenges; delivering culturally sensitive customer responses in multiple languages within a social media environment adds yet another layer of complexity.Not all monitoring platforms offer multi-language capabilities and many of those that do are severely limited in features; sentiment analysis, for example, may be basic or non-existent in many languages. Equally, the challenge of training and coordinating staff to deliver a high quality service increases exponentially with each additional language and region.

In a recent webinar on Social Media for Teams, Nokia’s Tom Messett explained why they have taken a de-centralised approach to social media engagement: “It’s very important to have local teams. They understand the local marketing conditions and the people and can often solve problems far better than I could from a central team.”

MANAGING YOUR MONITORING PROGRAMME

“Your team needs to be able to make decisions and know that they will be supported – even if they don’t make the right decision every time. This doesn’t just affect the marketing or PR team, but all parts of the business. Everyone needs to know that this is happening and that they may need to react at short notice”.Ronan Gillen, EU Social Customer Service Manager, eBay

Setting up a monitoring programme is of crucial importance, but it is just the first step in the process of listening to and responding to customers. Without a clear process for listening, capturing mentions, categorizing or reviewing them, assigning them and responding to them, even a relatively small volume of customer queries can overwhelm an unprepared team.

Social media monitoring platforms can also help to streamline processes and minimise staff time through automation. As Leon Chaddock from Sentiment explains, “Automation can make your listening platform more efficient. Things like sending certain types of question to a specific team member can really improve efficiencies”.

One of the most difficult challenges for brands using social media for customer service is to maintain a record of the engagement when the conversation moves from platform to platform. A conversation can

Tom Messett, Head of Digital Marketing and Advocacy, Nokia

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start on Facebook and then move to email or chat, before being re-ignited on Twitter. Many customer engagement platforms will maintain a record of interactions within a specific platform, but very few will track conversations across platforms.

While it’s important to react to customers within the environment in which they choose to communicate with the brand, it’s often advisable to lead customers into channel which allows for more in-depth and private exchanges than, say, Twitter or Facebook. Citibank, for example, has integrated a chat feature, so that its @askciti team can easily move conversations into a private, secure and trackable channel.

eBay has a similar process but, as Ronan Gillen describes, is also conscious of the ability of social media to help spread solutions to common problems: “Although social customer service tends to start off being public, we often resolve the problem offline; particularly if there’s a serious or sensitive issue. On the other hand, where there is a general problem that could affect other users, we will always go public with a message that can be shared with everyone”.Beyond the essentials of creating a logical work-flow for your organisation, the oil that greases the wheels of your social customer service work-flow is likely to be empowerment. “Your team needs to be able to make decisions and know that they will be supported – even if they don’t make the right decision every time”, explains Ronan Gillen. “It’s about empowering the people on the front-line. They require flexibility in order to do their job”.

Unlike traditional Customer Service, in which customer queries are almost always private, social customer queries are usually public. The added pressure of dealing with a public complaint should be felt not only by the front-line staff, but by the whole organisation. In this sense every team and department needs to be ‘on-call’ to help resolve customer queries, when required. According to Ronan: “Everyone at eBay knows that this is happening and that they may need to react at short notice”.

This need for joined-up thinking has led some commentators to suggest that, although difficult to implement, social customer service could have a lasting transformational effect on how organisations communicate internally. Katy Howell is in no doubt about how organisations need to adapt to the social customer mindset: “It requires business transformation and a change in goals to incorporate social media. It is essential that what you’re trying to achieve becomes a bit more joined up and that you don’t think of the customer only in terms of one channel”.

A key element of this internal communication piece is to get different teams and departments working closely together to monitor for social media mentions, manage the brand response and, ultimately, deliver customer satisfaction. This is something Ronan Gillen at eBay puts particular emphasis on: “A critical part of this is making sure that different departments know each other well and interact daily. Their relationship is as important as the engagement”.

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MEETING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS

“Expectations are high. Customers want a response within the hour, or ideally immediately. Sometimes you just need to let them know you’re working on it - even if you don’t have the answer to hand right away. The customer appreciates it”.Ronan Gillen, EU Social Customer Service Manager, eBay

It could be argued that the single biggest driver of Social Customer Service is customer expectations. While most brand mentions on Twitter do not require a service response – because they are simply talking about the company or products – people who comment on a brand’s Facebook Page, blog or forum usually do expect a personal and timely response. A 2012 survey from Edison Research4 found that most people who engage with brands via social media expect a response the same day and 40% within the hour.

4 Survey: Edison Research, http://socialhabit.com/secure/wp-content/up-loads/2012/09/Slide1.png

Without an effective social media listening process in place, brands cannot hope to live up to the demands of consumers in a world of real-time communication. Ronan Gillen from eBay sums up the challenge, and a smart way of rising to it: “Expectations are high. Customers want a response within the hour, or ideally immediately. Sometimes you just need to touch a query, let them know you’re there and you’re working on it, even if you don’t have the answer to hand right away, the customer appreciates it”.

Given the shift in processes required, it is perhaps unsurprising that brands are failing to respond quickly enough, though a survey from Expion5, which ranked brands on Facebook by how quickly they responded to posts and comments from fans, found that the top 10 brands normally responded within 1 hour. KLM and Walmart responded in less than 30 minutes while CBS News took 1 hour and 26 minutes to reply.One result of a slow response can be to elicit a second post from the customer, which is often less accommodating than the first. This raises the question of prioritization. While customers might expect to be dealt with on a first-come-first-served basis, it often makes sense for brands to prioritise urgent enquiries over less time-sensitive ones.

Monitoring platforms can help brands to identify urgent queries. By setting up filters for major issues, extreme negative sentiment or expletives, brands can skim the highest priority issues and deal with them first. Leon Chaddock from Sentiment adds to this, “You should also prioritise people that are talking to

5 Survey by Expion: http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-exam-ples/top-brands-social-media-customer-service-facebook-twitter/

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you or addressing you directly, not just everyone that mentions you”.

In some circumstances it may be difficult for the brand to access genuinely real-time data. Twitter restricts access to its real-time “firehose” and charges for the amount of data it provides, so some monitoring platforms can’t guarantee real-time data. Similarly, many forums and blogs don’t syndicate their content in a timely manner, making it harder to pick up brand mentions and respond within the timescales that customers expect.

Brands also need to be careful about when to make an intervention.

Sentiment provides customer service monitoring for several high-street banks and utilities. They recommend their clients to steer clear of making sales-oriented or uninvited forays into third party conversations. “Be careful which conversations you jump into”, advises CEO, Leon Chaddock, “There’s a difference between people talking to you, and people talking about you. If you’re not being directly addressed it’s no different to jumping in to a stranger’s conversation in the pub. Expect a rebuff”.

eBay’s Social Customer Service team monitors all brand mentions, but is restrained about when and how it intervenes: “You don’t want to interact with people who want to make a point, but don’t necessarily want a response”, says Ronan Gillen “How do you know the difference between someone who wants help, and someone that just wants to vent?

You need to think 2 or 3 tweets ahead and make a judgment.”

One of the most positive outcomes of a social customer service intervention, of course, is when a detractor is converted into an advocate. The theory goes that if someone is passionate enough about your brand or products to complain, they probably care enough to become an advocate, if treated the right way. In 2011 BMW famously converted an excoriating Facebook detractor into such a fan that he actually bought the car he had previously bemoaned.eBay is happy with the response it gets from customers via social channels. “When you’re there and you actually help, you get a great response - particularly when people aren’t expecting us to come back so quickly”, explains Ronan Gillen. “People we help are delighted and we get a lot of nice comments made”.

KEY MONITORING FEATURES

Monitoring for customer service is a team exercise. Nobody can be online 24/7 or capable of answering every question, so certain team working features are essential. These might include:• Real-time ‘locking’ of conversations – i.e. once a

Customer Service Team member starts to engage with a customer, that conversation is immediately locked down so that other team members can’t respond to it unless it is assigned to them.

• Assigning – the ability to refer a conversation to another staff member within the monitoring platform.

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• Tagging – so that you can filter conversations by type

• Notes – so that you can add extra details about conversations

• Conversation History – a record of each customer query and the response provided.

• Customer History - a record of all the engagements with that specific customer

• CRM Integration - integration with your customer database or CRM system

Ensuring that the Customer Service team is familiar with these tools and capable of using them in a heated ‘live’ environment is essential to the smooth running of your monitoring and engagement process.Although it is not made easy by many of the monitoring platform providers or CRM vendors, integration with a customer database or CRM system can be hugely valuable. As Ronan Gillen explains: “Most companies will have a CRM system to help them store customer details and understand customers issues, so that needs to be integrated with the monitoring platform that sits on top. In order for the customer to receive a coherent service, you need to be able to see the whole customer journey.”

In addition to team-working features, certain standard monitoring features are particularly useful in a customer service environment. Tracking the sentiment of mentions in relation to a brand can provide a useful ‘health-check’ at a macro level. By maintaining a certain level of positive over negative sentiment you get a flavor of how popular the brand is. Equally, though, you can use sentiment monitoring as an early warning system for impeding crises. Setting up alerts that are triggered by extreme negative sentiment is as useful for Customer Service as it is for PR and Communication teams.

Monitoring sentiment can also tell you if your support efforts are having an effect at a more tactical level, such as resolving issues relating to a particular product.

Beyond sentiment, advanced social media monitoring platforms are exploring ways of detecting the ‘intention’ of customers when they mention a brand; in other words, whether they are making a passing statement, asking a question or making a complaint. Sentiment are looking to integrate this into their Customer Engagement suite and, while it’s still early days, Leon Chaddock is bullish about it value: “Obviously a tool isn’t going to evaluate a customer’s intention correctly one hundred percent of the time, but then, neither is a human”.

One of the most fascinating and controversial opportunities available to brands engaging in social media monitoring is to prioritise their Customer Service efforts according to the perceived ‘influence’ Ronan Gillen, EU Complaints, Community & Social

Customer Service Manager, eBay

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of the person making the complaint. This might go against our sense of natural justice, but faced with an angry, well-followed, celebrity on Twitter or Facebook, it may be tempting for brands to jump them to the front of the queue.

“If a very influential person complains, monitoring enables you to escalate it to PR and Comms very quickly - so they are at least aware that this could flare up and go viral” explains Katy Howell of Immediate Future, “The ability to see that someone has influence is important”.

Sentiment has a feature designed specifically to enable this. The platform calculates influencer metrics based on the reach and resonance of individuals on the major social networks. It also has a feature which automatically prioritises people with high influence scores, or assigns them to a certain team member.While this is undoubtedly useful, eBay Europe prefers to prioritise queries based on the urgency of the issue raised. Ronan Gillen explains: “We’re not saying we’d never do it, but it’s not something we look for as routine. We’d be more likely to look for who are our most important customers and what can we do for them, rather than who is seen as influential”.

PREVENTING AND MANAGING CRISES

The initial driver for most major brands to engage in social media monitoring is crisis prevention. In addition to helping to identify ‘influential’ detractors (as described above), having a platform that enables

you to capture and manage, potentially, thousands of customer queries posted to social media channels, can be invaluable.

When BT suffered a network outage in 2009 they were quick to turn to social media to update their customers. As Bian Salins, BT’s former Head of Social Media Innovation and Customer Service, explains: “What we saw was largely negative sentiment turn very quickly into positive sentiment purely because of the way we chose to communicate and the transparency with which we communicated with our audience. Those two things are core to how brands manage crisis situations.”

Similarly, when UK mobile operator, O2, suffered a major service outage in 2012, the company was widely praised for its rapid and, frequently, witty responses sent via Twitter. By actively monitoring and engaging with detractors they were able to turn negative sentiment into positive buzz. EE, a competitive mobile operator in the UK claims to have 1500 staff trained to engage with customers via Twitter, should they face such a crisis.

Ronan Gillen’s team at eBay has taken a smaller-scale approach. “We have back-ups from other teams who are trained and able to engage during a spike or to cover sickness and holidays. Spikes can happen any time and you can’t always predict them”.

While it’s certainly true that you can’t predict crises, actually pretending to have one can help you to prepare for when they do occur. Katy Howell has

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worked with companies such as Diageo and Staples on their social media strategies and helped many brands to manage social media crises. Her advice is clear: “Simulations are a brilliant way to flush out the details. In a crisis you often spot problems you weren’t expecting. During one crisis simulation we did – the person with the Twitter login details was off sick and it wasn’t stored centrally. Often it’s the simple things that haven’t occurred to anyone”.

GAINING CUSTOMER INSIGHT

Away from the coal-face of direct customer engagement, the data gathered through social media monitoring can also be incredible useful. By categorizing and sifting through data relating to past queries and complaints, brands can gain insights that simply aren’t visible from day-to-day interactions.

Katy Howell cites a prime example: “When looking at complaints for one company, we realised that around half weren’t actually complaints, they were queries about a technical piece of equipment that showed error codes. As everyone throws their manuals away, they had no idea what the codes meant. An online forum or FAQ would have been able to handle these queries and deferred a large proportion of the support cost”.

In addition to eliciting customer insights from monitoring data, it also presents opportunities for improving processes internally. Katy’s team at Immediate Future devised a measurement

framework for each customer service client, dividing up the dashboards into three sections to provide three separate areas of evaluation:

1. Service – listening volume, relevant conversation volume, handling time

2. Effectiveness - customer satisfaction, revenue generation or cost reduction, loyalty/sentiment

3. Quality - agent performance, first-post resolution, escalation and transfer rate

This framework enables them to evaluate the results of their monitoring and engagement activities and drive future improvements.

eBay uses a similar process but also use data to cross-check the performance of their Social Customer Service team against other teams. “We look at our monitoring statistics and learn from them”, says Ronan Gillen, “We also look at ourselves in relation to other Customer Service channels. There are some metrics which are standard across Customer Service that we benchmark ourselves against”.

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A FINAL wORDThe final point to make on monitoring for customer service is that it continues to evolve, such that a good strategy requires on-going assessment and iteration. Consumers move around, switching between social networks, finding new blogs and forums and adopting completely new channels of communication. There is no fixed model. Organisations need to track where the related conversations are taking place and adapt quickly.

There are also indications that, as consumers, we are getting smarter about how and where we look for help online. We might post to social networks when we want to punish a brand, but 10% of us now seek peer-support via review sites, while 12% use niche forums6. Organisations need an understanding of what consumers are using each channel for, so that they can respond appropriately. Unsurprisingly, when we really need support, we’re most likely to post a comment on the corporate website.

The most innovative and forward thinking organisations are also starting to look beyond reactive social media monitoring towards developing pro-active outreach activities. In the US, Citibank has been monitoring social media for consumers suffering financial plight, offering advice and support and, early in 2013, Dutch bank AMN AMRO set up a specialist monitoring team to help teenagers with travel insurance queries. Both strategies went beyond traditional customer support and could be considered marketing activities.

This highlights the increasingly blurred line between customer service, marketing and communications in social media. While it may be possible to distinguish between customer motives, knowing who should respond, and how, requires planning and co-ordination. Technology in the form of monitoring tools and team-working features can facilitate this, but in the end it’s often the human response - the personal touch – that enhances the customer relationship.

6 http://oursocialtimes.com/23-of-people-complain-online-out-of-vengence/

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AUTHOR

Luke Brynley-Jones is the Founder & CEO of Our Social Times, one of the UK’s best known social media agencies, whose clients include The Telegraph Media Group, Orange Business Services and Mecca Bingo. A social media specialist with over 13 years’ experience developing online communities for global brands, Luke is a popular speaker at international conferences, a frequent contributor to industry publications and a regular social media commentator for BBC radio.Since 2010 Luke has hosted an annual series of social CRM, social media monitoring and social customer service conferences across Europe and the US. He also chairs monthly webinars on niche social media topics, including social customer service. For more information visit www.oursocialtimes.com

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