What stands between businesses deciding that social customer service is just another can of worms they’d prefer not to open and the flourish of an enterprise social butterfly? Often, it’s the lack of available metrics for this emerging channel, or simply, the proper means to measure it.
Many organizations either aren’t measuring social customer service yet, are manually recording interactions and outcomes in spreadsheets, or are siloing social customer service and data because they haven’t yet incorporated social support with the same workflow and analytics used for other channels.
The organizations that have begun using and measuring social media as a customer service channel are garnering impressive results, however. For instance, as highlighted at the recent Gartner Customer 360 Summit, McAfee has witnessed an 85%+ improvement in call deflection though social customer service, while Mint.com enjoyed a 70% reduction in support tickets in a period of just 90 days.
Call and Response
Both providing and measuring social customer service can be daunting, especially for enterprise organizations and big brands. Take for example, Walmart, whose brand name is mentioned more than 23,000 times a day on Twitter alone, according to The Most Tweeted Brands website. If Walmart had to respond to every mention, they’d be publishing 17+ responses a minute. And if Disney responded to tweets every second of the day, they still wouldn’t be able to keep up with the more than 105,000 daily mentions of their brand name on Twitter.
Emerging as Social Customer Service Leader
Beyond the basic thanks for a positive brand mention, customer service questions and complaints involve much more time and effort. And the expectations for a reply are great. In terms of response expectations, a Social Habit survey notes that 32% of consumers expect a response within 30 minutes of their inquiry; 42% within an hour. Brands rising to the occasion are seeing big returns on customer satisfaction and brand advocacy. According to NM Incite, 71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective brand response on social media are likely to recommend that brand to others, compared to just 19% of customers who do not receive a response.
So once a brand emerges from its protective cocoon to become responsive on social media, what customer service and communication metrics should be tracked upon launch? During a recent presentation at the Gartner Customer 360 Summit, Jenny Sussin, principal research analyst at Gartner, highlighted nine to start:
- Time to first response
- Average handling time (overall and by agent)
- Number and percent of serviceable posts (actual customer/consumer inquiries)
- Percent of inquiries managed by channel (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Cost savings on call deflection
- Changes in sentiment
- Changes in customer satisfaction
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- And flush rate (posts that are no longer relevant or serviceable).
Not only do these metrics help improve customer service and validate social media as a support channel, but they’re vital to almost every department within an organization including sales, marketing, product development and achieving a 360-degree view of the customer.
Whether your organization is still inching along in the initial stages of social customer service or has emerged as an impressive butterfly flourishing in the social spring, start early with the measurement of your organization’s social customer service efforts to ensure long-term growth and success.
More Customer Care Content You May Be Interested In:
