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Author: Amanda Sternquist, Director of Social Care Practice, Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS)

If you think you’re providing superior social care, be sure to get confirmation from your customers. Today’s research shows a disconnect—with 80% of businesses believing they provide superior social media customer service and only 8% of customers describing the service in the same light, according to the Sprout Social 2018 Index. Additionally, nearly all businesses (87% according to a survey by Hootsuite) agree that social media is important to staying competitive, with nearly 70% of respondents stating that social media has significant business impact, with solid contribution to their company’s bottom line.

According to this research, social care is increasingly how today’s customers ask product questions, seek recommendations, make purchase decisions and engage with brands to show affinity. Today’s businesses can no longer ignore social media as a customer experience (CX) channel.

Social media has a strong hold on increasing brand value, marketing, recall and retention and is an essential tool in any brand’s toolkit. Whether a brand has an established social media customer care program or is launching one for the first time, there are three common questions they will inevitably ask of their social care team.

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What is a typical first response time to reach an epic level of social customer care?

The industry standard is under four hours – some customer service providers reduce that to less than two hours to continuously strive to exceed customer expectations. This is achievable with the help of artificial intelligence, which funnels the most engageable content to the right people at the right time.

For example, if someone is at a store or a restaurant right now and they need help, those keywords are prioritized to hit social care agent queues first so that the customer receives a response back within seconds or minutes, depending on the need.

How do you determine the volume of social engagement and the number of resources needed?

During the research phase of a new program, it’s important to do a deep analysis of the content trends over the past several months. This provides a good estimate of not only the volume of mentions coming in, but the type of content that is generated about the brand. If the answer is "everything," then plan for that volume. If it can be narrowed a bit further, it will give a more realistic idea of how many agents it would take to help the brand achieve its social media response goals.

A best practice in social customer care is creating a pool of talent that is trained and capable of working between programs. This allows the ability to offer a steady state coverage model with back up support in the event of a brand crisis.

What about negative comments? For example, "I hate xyz product." How do you handle those?

The goal is to try to understand what it is that the customer ‘hates,’ and if there is an alternative that we can recommend. Review who the customer is and get to know them, not only their issue, through a vetting process. This allows the opportunity to create a connection with the individual at their level to resolve their issue.

It’s also important to determine if the situation should be reported back to the company, if there is certain volume around a specific complaint. This helps inform the brand when making key business decisions. If a trending issue is identified, the client can be quickly prepped for a PR strategy and a social care response plan.

Every mention that comes into a social care monitoring system should be automatically or manually tagged with a conditionally granular level of detail. This enables real-time insights generation into a variety of focus areas.

Overall, it is important for brands to place an importance on superior social customer care. Something as small as customer response time can make a difference in business results.

#contactcenterworld, @teamhgs, @team_hgs