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Beyond engagement: Top must-haves to drive customer experience forward
The customer experience doesn’t start and stop at a brand destination. It continues on social channels, where you have no control on what’s shared.
August 11, 2015
By Ekaterina Walter
Global Evangelist, Sprinklr
Customer experience is the new battleground and an important differentiator for brands. The customer experience doesn’t start and stop at your owned brand destinations (e.g., in-store, website, or mobile). It continues on social channels, where you have no control on what’s shared. Customers post reviews, contact brands directly on social, and broadcast issues in status updates.
It’s not surprising most customers expect a response from the brand. Why would the expectation on social be different than if a customer calls customer care or submits a support ticket? Most consumers expect brands to respond on social channels within 60 minutes, but only 17.6 percent of brands meet this expectation, and 21 percent of brands don’t respond at all (Newswire).
Engagement and customer care through social channels are important customer experience touchpoints. Those who do this well build deeper connections with customers, and they’re rewarded for it. When a customer receives a response to a complaint across social media and review sites, they are almost twice as likely to recommend the company afterward (Convince and Convert), and 34 percent will delete their negative review altogether (Forbes). Those who don’t engage on social channels and review sites—or worse, do it poorly—are throwing money away in the tune of 6.7 percent year-over-year revenue growth (Aberdeen Research).
Foundations for Engagement Success
Success doesn’t happen overnight. Your engagement program needs to be built on a strong foundation, and the feedback you collect from social needs to be integrated into the fabric of a customer-centric culture for you to reap the revenue benefits.
Let’s talk about how you get there.
Who responds?
There’s no right answer here. You need to decide if you will keep engagement and social customer care centralized (handled by one corporate team), localized (handled by someone at the location-level), or a combination of the two.
What to respond to?
Next, you need to prioritize responses and set goals. You may not be able to respond to every customer in the beginning due to resource constraints on your team. Don’t let this prevent you from starting. You don’t need to boil the ocean to start seeing ROI from engagement. Set goals and priority queues that are manageable.
It’s not unusual to have different priorities for responses. Not all comments are created equal, and your queues and acceptable response times (aka SLAs) should reflect this. Here are a few categories of comments we encourage our clients to respond to from the start:
- Everyone who writes a review on a specific review site, even if it’s just to say “Thank you!” or invite them to join your loyalty program
- Everyone who says “will not” come back and “will not” recommend
- Everyone who left without making a purchase
- Everyone who comments on a specific category, such as product availability or has a negative interaction with an employee
- Everyone who mentions your loyalty program
How do you track social?
It’s critical you centralize everything related to social so you can scale it across the enterprise. This means bringing in posts and reviews from more than just Twitter and Facebook, from the corporate level all the way down to location-specific sites like FourSquare or Google Places. It’s only with a centralized approach that you are able to effectively manage cases and understand what’s happening with a single customer across multiple social channels. This is Social CRM.
Plus, with a centralized approach, technology can do the heavy lifting. The benefits are endless. Here are my top seven:
- Save time from having to log in to multiple social sites or point solutions
- Automatically organize conversations and complaints into queues so they’re routed to the correct people or teams
- Measure response times to ensure you’re exceeding the new 60-minute expectation
- Tag campaigns for reporting
- Increase visibility of customer feedback across other parts of the organization
- Maintain a full engagement history and unified customer profile
- Create approval workflows to control outbound messages
Beyond the responses
Engagement is all about building connections, driving loyalty, and recovering customers. It’s an important touchpoint, but engagement will only take you so far. You need to think of it as part of your customer experience management practice, regardless of who owns the actual engagement process.
Some studies show as much as 95 percent customers will do business with you again if you resolve complaints immediately (Lee Resources International). However, you need to address the underlying issues causing the sub-par customer experiences. If customers continue to have the same issues over and over again, not only will you permanently lose those customers you spent time recovering, future potential customers will be deterred from ever giving you a chance.
To get the most out of your engagement efforts, you need to move beyond the response and become proactive. This requires two important steps: breaking down silos, and using social sentiment analysis to predict and get ahead of issues that matter most to customers.
Cross-silo collaboration
Customers don’t differentiate between sales and marketing, operations and customer care. If you’re going to move beyond a simple "I’m sorry your experience wasn’t great" to actually fixing it for both that individual and future customers, you need to share a unified view of the customer experience across the enterprise.
In essence, become customer-centric instead of business-centric. This seems obvious, but it’s much easier said than done. The second important ingredient is having the right data and making it available to relevant parties. If there’s an operations problem, does operations know about it? What if you could alert them in an automated way?
Predictive analytics and sentiment analysis
Customers are actively sharing what they thought of their experiences on social. Research reveals 38 percent of consumers give feedback directly to companies after a very bad experience, and 31 percent give direct feedback after a very good experience (Temkin Group). In every post, customers give you important data on how they viewed their experience, and how that experience influences their decision to purchase now and in the future.
Collectively, the people within your organization managing your social presence likely have a good sense of overall customer sentiment. But it’s fragmented across multiple people, and possibly teams. Tracking changes in sentiment as well as frequently mentioned categories is nearly impossible if you’re relying only on those social media agents.
You need to move beyond engagement to internalize this feedback as you would any other voice of the customer data. Quickly applying predictive analytics and sentiment analysis that breaks down the online conversations into useable customer experience insights is the answer to getting more out of your social investments.
About the Author:Ekaterina Walter is the author of the WSJ bestseller “Think Like Zuck” and “The Power of Visual Storytelling” and Global Evangelist at Sprinklr.
