Improving Customer Support Through Social Networking

Individuals are more and more embracing social networking for a multitude of tasks including service and product related feedback. This feedback includes online reviews, service complaints, product defects, suggestions and general queries. Multi-funnel customer support and support, including the more and more important social networking platforms, frequently creates significant challenges for businesses because they must retrieve, review, respond and report across an array of platforms and websites. Included in this are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, in addition to a number of other platforms and sites which should be monitored and addressed. Let us review a few of the critical factors of the effective social feedback and support initiative.

Retrieve, Listen & Learn

Many service teams understand social networking tools that automate company or brand searches. These power tools vary from easy to sophisticated, helping companies search webpages and social networking pages for keywords and keywords and key phrases. Hearing what clients are saying is simply the beginning when the automated tools identify posts and comments, then your real work begins. Companies must retrieve, review after which react to the resulting posts, comments, suggestions and complaints.

Evaluate & Classify

For the way much volume your brand’s social networking pages generate, you need to evaluate and classify customer activity to higher understand the type of issues being elevated over the social networking platforms. Companies should collect and evaluate on the daily or perhaps real-time basis. As companies retrieve sufficient data for analysis, stratify responses into predetermined groups. For instance:

When are customers most participating in these platforms?

Total comments associated with poor customer experience.

Comment ratio – # positive versus negative.

Quantity of brand related comments deserving an answer.

These are merely a couple of of the numerous comment permutations that need considering. It’s not hard to comprehend the challenges most customer support organizations face with regards to social networking feedback. Feedback ought to be classified based on predetermined business rules produced through the service teams.

Monitor & Manage

Feedback speed of fact is critical in the current exploding social networking atmosphere. Companies should triage their responses, prioritizing serious problems for example outages, defects, intricacies and negative comments with viral implications, in front of other comments for example general comments and recommendations for refinements. Companies can produce a customer support feedback priority list, parse comments into predetermined groups, classify based on predetermined business rules and respond accordingly.

Establish Response Goals

How quickly must you react to social networking comments? Most professionals agree that buyers using social networking have high response expectations when posting comments, questions and complaints online. Hrs instead of days ought to be the mantra with regards to this kind of customer response. Autoresponders offer instant response, however these prefabricated responses frequently do nothing more than alerting customers that the service team has gotten their comment. Supplying an immediate and accurate answer might involve a preliminary response via social networking, having a follow-up utilizing a different service funnel. For instance, your customer support tweet might allow the customer know you will be calling or emailing the customer within 24 hrs (or sooner), based upon your merchandise priorities.

Social feedback solutions are imperative today, because the world quickly embraces social platforms like a primary type of communication. Think about these recent statistics for unique monthly people to social networking sites.

Facebook: 900,000,000

Twitter: 310,000,000

LinkedIn: 255,000,000

Google : 120,000,000

Let us use Twitter to have an example. There are approximately 350,000 tweets sent each minute, which equals 500 million tweets each day the number of of individuals connect with your organization and brand status? What’s your present and future customer recovery plan concerning this massive and growing social feedback volume?

Respond & Resolve

Your organization must define the problems and frame the responses that the social networking customer support team will handle. This ought to be intelligently routed and done this on the real-time basis. As well as your team will have to pick which kinds of posts don’t require any response. It’s unlikely any business can or should react to every publish or comment. Triage your comments ought to, and see which kinds of posts or comments should be addressed. To simplify this method, some companies use outsourced social feedback methods to track, respond, monitor and evaluate the information.

Report & Refine

There must be ongoing refinements for your response criteria according to emerging trends and social networking platform changes. Top quality systems and current methodologies should lead to actionable information for continuous improvement.

Staff Up Or Delegate

As tools and technologies change with growing frequency, a lot of companies will dsicover outsourcing part or all their social networking customer support initiative could be a more efficient approach than staffing up internally. A effective social feedback solution offers companies a listening tool to gather additional customer information to solve customer complaints and, if required, go ahead and take conversation off-line for resolution.