How Can You Tell if Your Customer Service on Social Media is Effective?

The purpose of this blog is to select an area of Dave Chaffey’s six channels model (Chaffey, 2016) to audit, the channel this blog will audit is Social Media Marketing but specifically Customer Feedback on Social Media channels, mainly focusing on Twitter.

“67% of consumers have used a company’s Social Media channel for customer service” (J.D. Power, 2013)

In the digital age, the most important element of customer service is for companies to be available 24/7 across the channels their customers use (Post, 2017). Companies are under increased pressure to respond to customers across their Social Media channels. According to Gregory (2017) 42% of customers expect a response on Social Media within 1 hour, some may think this is unrealistic, however Figure 1 shows an Academic framework by Bhatia et al. (2013) which demonstrates how a company can deal with a large volume of social interactions from customers.

By exploring Figure 1, organisations can Monitor tweets/mentions by employing a ‘crawler’ to scan key words & brand name mentions relevant to them.

The organisation will then use a pre-processor to analyse the crawled data further, using machine learning to understand if the mentions are positive, negative or neutral.

After this step, the mentions will be grouped into ‘events’ with tweets/mentions of a similar nature/emotion grouped together.

Finally, the ‘events’ will be accessible to the customer care agents who can then decide how to engage with the groups to solve their problems/queries.

This is an example of how an organisation can deal with queries received from their customers on Social Media, so what does good and bad social media customer service look like?

Good Social Media Customer Feedback

The above example by Sainsbury’s is a perfect demonstration of effective Social Media customer service. Sainsbury’s humanise their posts by signing them as ‘David’ instead of the brand, which has proved to be important for customers (Gregory, 2017).

Not only do Sainsbury’s ‘humanise’ there interactions, they also adopt a creative approach which uses humour in their interactions with their customers. Rohampton (2017) said that this approach can cause a ‘double-win’, this is because the customer response is resolved, and the tweet can go viral which could bring in new followers and positive exposure to the Sainsbury’s brand.

Xbox have been awarded as the ‘most responsive brand on Twitter (Burke, 2016). They have a team of 27 Twitter support experts who can deal with large tweet volumes, averaging 2 tweets per minute (Haines, 2015). Xbox can provide fast, efficient Social Media customer service because they have employed an expert team to focus on this channel. This has been flagged as ‘good practice’ and Nike have a similar approach, they have a designated ‘Nike Support’ team who deal with customer’s across social media channels which is 24/7 and available in 7 different languages (Haines, 2015).

Bad Social Media Customer Feedback

A key element of ‘Good’ Social Media customer service is being able to rapidly respond and solve the customer’s issues in a quick, efficient manner. Burke (2016) pinpointed British Airways as an example of poor social media customer service, a user was so irritated at British Airways not responding to his tweet that he purchased the rights to get the tweet promoted. This attracted publicity to the user’s tweet and left many confused as to why British Airways weren’t responding to this unsatisfied customer.

Eventually, British Airways did respond by apologising and stating that their Twitter feed is only open between the hours of 09:00 – 17:00 GMT. Polaczyk (2016) mentions that customers will judge you by your reaction to customers via Social Media, they will look at the response time, the reaction and how the customer reacted to the whole conversation. In the case for British Airways, the way they dealt with this user only created negative publicity for the company.

So how can companies tell if their customer service on Social Media is effective? (Conversocial, 2015

Step 1: Volume – Count all incoming mentions across Social Media channels and look at the response volume which counts the total number of responses from the company. Both are useful to work out the % of mentions managed, companies should always look to improve this percentage.

Step 2: Response – Check the First Response Time (FRT) which is the time between a customers first mention and the agents first response. Also check the Average Response Time (ART) which calculates the average time between customers mentions and agents replies throughout the whole Social conversation.

Step 3: Handling Time – Calculate Handling Time (HT) which calculates the time agents spend processing an issue and effectively resolving an issue. This can be useful for companies to see if Social Media has quicker processing times than traditional methods.

Step 4: Sentiment – Calculating sentiment is more of a qualitative measurement. This looks at an overall assessment of a customer’s tone and content of messages throughout the Social conversation, usually the customer will start with a negative tone and then by the end of the conversation should feel more positive if the situation has been resolved effectively.

References

Bhatia, S., Li, J., Peng, W. & Sun, T. (2013) ‘Monitoring and analyzing customer feedback through social media platforms for identifying and remedying customer problems’, ACM and IEEE. pp. 1147.

Burke, S. (2016) ‘Examples Of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly Of Customer Service On Social Media!’. Get Spokal, 14^th June 2016 [Online] < http://www.getspokal.com/examples-of-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-of-customer-service-on-social-media/> [Accessed 20^th November 2017]

Chaffey, D. (2016) ‘Definitions of Digital marketing vs Internet marketing vs Online marketing’. Smart Insights, 21^st December 2016 [Online] < https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-marketing-mix/definitions-of-emarketing-vs-internet-vs-digital-marketing/> [Accessed 17^th November 2017]

Conversocial (2015) ‘The 2015 Definitive Guide To Social Media Customer Service’ [Online] <http://www.conversocial.com/social-customer-service/measuring-customer-service >  [Accessed 27th November 2017]

Gregory, S. (2017) ‘6 Key Elements of Using Social Media for Customer Service’. Fresh Sparks, 15^th January 2017 [Online] < http://freshsparks.com/using-social-media-for-customer-service/> [Accessed 21^st November 2017]

Haines, B. (2015) ‘14 Amazing Social Media Customer Service Examples (And What You Can Learn From Them)’. Buffer Social, 29^th December 2015 [Online] < https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-customer-service> [Accessed 18^th November 2017]

J.D. Power (2013) ‘Poor Social Media Practices can Negatively Impact a Businesses’ Bottom Line and Brand Image’ [Online] < http://www.jdpower.com/press-releases/2013-social-media-benchmark-study> [Accessed 28^th November 2017

Polaczyk, J, (2016) ‘How to Handle Negative Comments on Social Media Like a Pro’. Live Chat Blog, 13^th April 2016 [Online] < https://www.livechatinc.com/blog/how-to-handle-negative-comments-on-social-media/> [Accessed 20^th November 2017]

Post, J. (2017) ‘How to Use Social Media for Customer Service’. Business News Daily, 22^nd September 2017 [Online] < https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5917-social-media-customer-service.html> [Accessed 21^st November 2017]

Rohampton, J. (2017) ‘How To Provide Witty And Effective Customer Support On Social Media’. Forbes, 7^th March 2017 [Online] < https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimmyrohampton/2017/03/07/how-to-provide-witty-and-effective-customer-support-on-social-media/#7d5d1cb77dd3> [Accessed 21^st November 2017]