Social media revolutionized the world of customer service as it fuels the demands of consumers for instantaneous assistance and responses. While customers previously tolerated waiting for 24 to 48 hours for their concerns to be resolved, today’s consumers want immediate answers. Of course, this proves problematic for many brands as it is difficult to keep track of thousands, if not millions of followers in any social media platform.
With this in mind, a group of social media specialists and customer relationship management (CRM) experts teamed up to jumpstart The Great Social Customer Service Race, a study that tested the effectiveness of a brand’s response to customer service utilizing Twitter.
Ready, set, go!
The race included 14 world-renowned brands encompassing major players in seven industries, including fast food, personal care, and consumer technology. The participants sent 280 tweets in 26 days, gauging the brands’ responses based on five categories: an urgent consumer request, a positive feedback, a negative feedback, a technical question or a question from a brand’s FAQ, and a tweet that requires more than one interaction to resolve.
The results provided groundbreaking insight to the industry. The brands responded to only 14% of the tweets sent by the team. This led the group to publish their findings in an effort to boost social media-customer service interaction.
The findings
The Great Social Customer Service Race unveiled four CRM lessons all brands in the social media sphere should remember. If implemented properly, these tips have the capability to create a reputation for your brand as a customer-centric organization. The tips are as follows:
- Monitor the Twitter feed for your brand name. This includes posts with direct mentions (@yourusername), without direct tags (posts that just mention your username, such as “I hate the services of yourusername!”), and the use of hashtags (#yourbrand). By keeping an eye on all three identifiers, you will be able to isolate tweets that pertain to your organization and provide more straightforward customer service.
- Monitor keywords appropriately. For example, instead of just focusing on mentions with the keywords “help,” try to expand your search terms to include “angry,” “transfer,” and similar terms. This would ensure that you would be covering the most volatile kinds of customers: those who are considering transferring brands, and those who are upset with your services. By targeting who these users are, you would be able to step in before they decide to take their business elsewhere.
- It is important for companies to have a tracking tool. This tool would help your personnel keep track of all tweets and mentions, which in turn could be instrumental in determining if all mentions that require customer service were already addressed. This would also avoid missing an important tweet or an opportunity.
- Keep a document of customer interactions. This would help your staff determine if a particular Twitter user has already expressed displeasure on your services, which means you should provide a more instantaneous response for that user in comparison with others. Similarly, keep a list of users which are frequent Twitter users as these people are more prone to be heard by the public (and thus increase the chances of negative retweets) and their followers.
Open Access BPO provides competitive services that includes customer support and social media management. Visit our website today to find out more about the company and the services we offer.
Photo credit: greyweed on Flickr.
