Social customer care & Metrics: Who are they helping?

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I read an article the other day by Neil Davey (Editor, MyCustomer) – Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Customer Service. I’m always interested in anything to do with social customer care ROI, metrics and KPIs.

In the post Neil kindly included something I had said at some point about measures: ‘A lot has previously revolved around process efficiency – how quickly calls are answered – they’re not about the experience or resolving an issue.’

As I read through the different types of metrics, how they should be interpreted, and how they relate to ROI, I was struck by one thought: who do these measures benefit?

I put together a quick table drawing the different metrics, categories and ROI together. The image is a bit blurry, but if you click on the table you can see where I take the different metrics, categories and ROI from in the original article.

Social Customer Care Metrics

The next column is ‘Company benefit’, followed by ‘Customer benefit’, followed lastly by ‘Will this resolve the customer’s issue’.

Two observations:

a) Quality is one of the categories that Walter Van Norden (Telus) proposes. Interestingly, there are no metrics for Quality.

b) It is obvious from the last three columns – columns that I have added – that these metrics only benefit the company. They address issues of process efficiency and customer satisfaction, but do not actually address whether or not a customers issue has been resolved.

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In the article, I went on to say:

A lot of the metrics reflect that focus on processes, and this is an outdated way to look at something. You still need to understand the processes but now experiential metrics are more important. So now you should see a different type of metric, in addition to the process metrics, that put the resolution or the issue first. You still need to understand the processes but now you need more experiential type of metrics coming in…’

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I wrote a post the other day about a response to a Tweet I came across from @NHSDirect – @NHSDirect and empathy? Or is it me?The post got me thinking about empathy and tone of voice, and it was one of the first times that I started to realise and think about the importance of tone of voice.

Is this one of the emerging metrics we need to start thinking about in terms of social customer care? I’m wondering what some of the others are? Is this more about working through the convergence of marketing, PR and customer service metrics? No matter what, I’m wondering whether we’ll still end up overlooking measuring whether a customer’s issue has been resolved…

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Guy Stephens
Guy is a social customer care trainer/consultant who has been in the social customer care space since 2008. He is also the Co-founder of Snak Academy, which provides online social customer care microlearning for individuals and SMEs.

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