We All Want the Same Simple Pleasures

“Customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20 to 40 percent more money with those companies than other customers.”²

Ready to put the “customer” back into the customer service touch point? The following fundamentals are a great place to start.

1. Transparency: Customers want price and support transparency in their shopping experience (at least that's true of Western customers—customers from countries such as South Korea and India may prefer negotiating). Make prices fair and readily available, and honor sales that may take place immediately after a big purchase. Don't make everything your customers' fault on the support side. Train and empower your agents to empathize and be empowered to solve problems. Transparency is akin to honesty. It is authentic unscripted communication that stays within the boundaries of your brand guidelines but doesn't feel robotic or generic.
2. Genuine hospitality: A customer can instantly see through a sales pitch or a forced greeting. Hire customer service reps who actually enjoy interacting with customers, and who don't bring their personal problems to work. Everyone will have off days, including sales reps, but they should be minimal. A warm welcome and genuine relationship building is what creates loyal customers.
3. Zero pressure: The day of pushy sales tactics are over. The “I am sorry, I can't help you, I just work here,” response is no longer a sufficient reason to end the call either, regardless of your metrics around call processing time. Zappos has succeeded because they literally removed any constraints that cause service reps to pressure someone off of the call or into a cross sale script that is unnatural or unwarranted. Your products or services should speak for themselves. Pressure will make a client never want to come back. Speed doesn't require pressure.
4. Easy secure transactions: This is true in brick-and-mortar shops as well as online shops, but especially the latter. The virtual shopping cart should be easy to manage, customize, and check out. Take as many forms of payment as you can, including new online services such as Venmo. You should make it as easy as possible to accept money. After all, no sale is final until that happens. Remember that the Ubers and Amazons of the world have changed all of our expectations and that anything harder than checking out on those platforms feels like a dinosaur. Life isn't fair, we know, but if you want to compete you have to invest in updating your UX/UI across all transactional platforms.

   You may think it is too expensive now, but a failure to do so will be catastrophically expensive later. The customer is not going to go back in time with their expectations. They will judge you harshly and deal with your archaic interface only until they discover an alternative means to solve that problem and be gone to you forever.

5. A comfortable shopping experience: A great visual merchandiser and/or web designer can make or break your business. In a physical store, customers should be able to intuit where to find what they need. Online, the website should have easy navigate, be user friendly, and boast mobile readiness and responsive design. The more comfortable a shopping experience is, the longer a person will stay. Empowering in-store personnel with the same technology tools as your customer so that they can provide on-the-floor checkout or accurate in-store inventory numbers leveraging beacons and tablets is a must.
6. Empathy: Training your staff across the board on the lost art of situational awareness and emotional intelligence will be a worthy investment. Understand where you customer is coming from and try to defuse situations. Train your people to remember that everyone is right from their own perspective and that the easiest way to get someone to potentially see something your way is to first invest the energy into trying to see it from the perspective they are looking through. However, don't put up with abuse. There's a thin line here, and one that should be considered on a case by case basis. Zombies buy stuff too. Have protocols in place that keep your employee health as a priority and have clearly established core values that allow your brand to take an effective stand that strengthens its bond with core customers and employees alike.

Relevant Goals for Customer Service with Social Media

1. Increase customer satisfaction
2. Lower customer service costs
3. Improve efficiency
4. Increase NPS (Net Promoter Score)
5. Reduce call volume by increased social care

Social Media Triage

It has been noted that in European countries, customer service is akin to courtship, whereas in North America we tend to think of it more as triage. What is “triage?” Typically, it's a medical term, defined by Wikipedia as “a process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition so as to treat as many as possible when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately.”²

Sounds like an inspiring place to start, right? So how does the concept of “triage” apply to social media monitoring?

The number of social posts that mention brands continually increases. In 2012, 53 percent of social media users complimented brands at least once a month.³ In addition, 50-plus percent of social media users expressed concerns or complaints about brands at least once a month. That was 5 years ago. The amount of noise coming through social channels is now at an all-time high.

If your organization has a social media monitoring program, you are likely becoming overwhelmed with incoming mentions. How is a smart social business to deal with all of the growing volume?

One solution is to use Social Monitoring Automation Triage to separate incoming signal from the staggering amount of Internet noise. Travis worked closely with Tristan Bishop at Symantec. He is now the head of Social Media for Informatica.

Tristan set up and managed the triage for Norton customer support. Can you imagine how many complaints and comments came through each day? It was off the charts. Tristan and team chose Radian6 for social listening, customer support, and triage.

Once this initial triage phase is complete, you can use manual triage to sort the signal, separating posts that require immediate company response from those that simply require research. Finally, a third level of triage can help you connect the optimal employee to the customer, based on the content of the social mention.

“Failure to respond via social channels can lead to up to a 15 percent increase in churn rate for existing customers.”

—Gartner⁴

What you are looking for are the messages that come through that you can act on. You can direct these to the employee in your organization who can best solve your customer's issue.

We chose to segment actionable posts into seven data classes:

1. Case: Request for help resolving real-time issue
2. Query: Question that doesn't require support resource
3. Rant: Insult that merits brand management consideration
4. Rave: Praise from your brand advocate
5. Lead: Pronouncement of near-term purchase decision
6. RFE: Request to enhance a product with a new feature
7. Fraud: Communication from an unauthorized provider of your products

Tristan helped set up the Symantec Global Triage team (Figure 12.1). They were like the British Empire, as the sun never set on them.⁵

We had people around the world helping sort, manage, and route posts of each class of customer message to a different business function for response, as follows:

1. Case: Routed to Technical Support for immediate interaction
2. Query: Routed to Information Developers and Technical Writers
3. Rant: Routed to PR for brand protection assessment
4. Rave: Routed to Marketing for proactive engagement with advocates
5. Lead: Routed to Sales for pipeline consideration
6. RFE: Routed to Product Management for road map consideration
7. Fraud: Routed to Legal for follow-up and official action

“By using Social Media Monitoring Triage, wise brands can reach customers on their channel of choice, connecting them to the employees best equipped to meet their needs. This attentive strategy improves customer experience and builds customer loyalty,” says Tristan Bishop.

Audit Your CX Center of Excellence

The definition of a Center of Excellence (COE) is a team, a shared facility, or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for the customer experience and social business domain within your organization.⁶

As you have already done with your earlier efforts in the Vision Layer of the EMF, we suggest you start with a clear list of goals, and the list below are the most common found across our client base. We hope they give you a good starting point or secondary source of external validation if you are auditing your current COE.

Goals of the Social/CX Center of Excellence

1. Provide best practices
2. Education and training
3. Administration control
4. Governance and compliance
5. Policy adherence
6. Executive visibility and buy-in

Where to Begin?

1. Start creating a social business COE by gathering a team of leaders from the various lines of business as well as representation from corporate communications and legal.
2. Next, define an operating model for the COE. This will include defining the mission and vision of the COE, tools, content strategy, staffing, training, education, and measures of success.
3. There is one thing that all COEs have in common: namely, assuming the role of change agent.

“I look at my role more as an enabler than anything else. The only way you're going to get true scale is by allowing people to have accountability for their efforts and ownership of their own programs, where they benefit,” said Don Bulmer, VP of Communication Strategy at Shell.

“We're able to then have a dialogue where they [business] see the benefits of working with our Center of Excellence because we give them data and information and context that allows them to be able to run with their programs benefiting from this platform that we've established. It's one company, right? It's one brand.”⁷

One of the core social business functions for your organization is community management. The community manager is the social face to your customers. The community manager role may fall under the COE or more frequently in the marketing department, although subject matter-specific community managers do tend to remain distributed across the company.

Executives are also key stakeholders of the Center of Excellence. Their participation in the COE can be instrumental in making your organization a true social business. They can use the COE to better exert oversight and social media governance directives, set goals, and monitor the transformation of the organization into a social business.⁸ Michael Brito wrote a great book called Your Brand that walks through this in depth.

Your brand's business pulse doesn't stop at 5 PM; why should you? Don't miss a beat. Having a COE helps keep your key players plugged in on-the-go, engaged with your community, and monitoring your brand in real-time 24/7/365.