Do you have a successful social customer care strategy?

This post is sponsored by Emplifi.

More than 3.6 billion people worldwide use social media, of which the largest audience is undoubtedly Asia.

Today, more than half of consumers expect to get a response from a brand within an hour, according to a recent study by Emplifi. And, it’s not surprising that it’s really only social media that can offer that kind of speed at scale.

People typically prefer interacting with brands on social media because it’s fast and personal. Therefore, great social customer care can help build a positive brand image and brand loyalty. 

Within many organisations, the customer care team is increasingly managing most if not all aspects of social engagement. In this complex and evolving space, here are four key things you should keep in mind. 

1. Be aware that agents need different skills for social customer care

As social media has become a core customer communication channel, many customer care teams have struggled to adjust to a more conversational, casual tone, versus the more traditional formalised language of emails or phone conversations (the same applies with SMS and web chat).

Tailoring their tone to the channel continues to be a challenge for many customer care teams, but now a new skills gap is emerging.

Fundamentally, agents’ focus is communicating one-on-one with customers to answer questions and resolve issues. But as more responsibility for social management shifts to their team, including outbound social media communications that have traditionally been managed by the marketing team, some brands are cross-training or hiring agents with social marketing and PR backgrounds.

Consider what talent you will need to hire, or the reskilling you’ll need to perform, if your care team takes over all social media management.

2. Use automation to separate the urgent posts from the noise

According to research from Microsoft, 65% of people aged 18-34 believe social media is an effective channel for customer service. If you are dealing with a large volume of messages from multiple social channels, it’s not always easy to quickly identify the actionable urgent posts mixed in with all the social noise.

Not only is manually filtering through every mention and post extremely inefficient, but it also poses a major obstacle to achieving the response times consumers expect. And to get the responsiveness badge on Facebook Messenger, brands must respond in 15 minutes or less (a great reason to use a chatbot to triage cases).

Social monitoring tools can automate this process – identifying which posts need your attention and automatically route them to agents for follow-up. Social media is all about immediacy and instant gratification, but fast response times are impossible without some help from automation.

3. Think about how to collaborate with marketing departments and agencies

As previously mentioned, the question of “who owns what part of social” is often complicated. For most companies, it’s not so cut-and-dried. Customer care must collaborate with marketing departments, agencies, HR, and other social stakeholders to keep things running smoothly.

With so many people managing messages, miscommunications and missed opportunities can happen. Having everyone use the same comprehensive social management platform that can handle social care, publishing, listening, and advertising, makes a huge difference in ensuring alignment between teams.

For example, if the agency or marketing team is managing social ads and scheduling posts in the same tool that agents use to manage customer engagement, there is total transparency and visibility between teams – which means no unpleasant surprises from either side.

4. Determine how you’ll track all interactions

Managing social customer interactions within each individual platform such as Facebook or Twitter is not only time-consuming and inefficient, but it also means that customer conversations are not tracked in a way that makes them easy to analyse.

A better alternative is integrating social management into a CRM or case management system. This enables agents to work cases from any channel – social networks included – in one interface. With this approach, you’re allowing agents to focus on handling cases instead of switching back and forth from screen to screen, which speeds up case resolution and accuracy. You’re also capturing all interactions in one central place for easier reporting and analytics.

Incorporating social care in your social commerce strategy

As shopping on social platforms hits new heights across Asia, B2C brands have mainly focused on driving revenue through their social media shops (or social shops, for short). In fact, social commerce strategies are three times more likely to focus on revenue than on customer needs, according to a new study conducted by Forrester Consulting. 

As part of their investment in social commerce, brands are emphasising the importance of social media care, as more brands are considering ways to build one-to-one customer relationships by providing more personalised interactions throughout the entire customer journey.

Technology will play a key role in this transition, as more and more brands deploy advanced chatbots in their social shops that can handle sophisticated queries – and escalate to human agents when needed.

To provide effective care on social channels, brands need the ability to provide real-time responses to significant volumes of queries, around the clock. In addition, they need to provide truly personalised answers, guidance, and assistance, so that shoppers feel they are receiving high-quality care that meets their specific needs.

Advanced conversational technology will be key to providing such experiences at scale. In the next 12 to 24 months, Forrester reports the vast majority of B2C brands plan to implement or are interested in developing advanced social bots that can provide a higher level of assistance:

• Execute conclusive transactions (82%).
• Engage in more sophisticated, consultative conversations (80%).
• Provide contextual responses to purchase questions (80%).

Create a caring social connection

Social media accounts are important touch-points for connecting with your customers. According to Gartner, 60% of all customer service requests will be managed via digital channels by 2023.

Whether they are seeking information, purchasing a product, or requesting help with an issue, customers expect a fast, complete, and helpful response. Automation will enable more effective and satisfying care throughout the customer journey, enabling social bots to respond to queries that used to require a human agent. Still, there will always be questions or problems that only a human can resolve.

Do you need help developing a social media customer service strategy? Get in touch with our team to learn more or schedule a demo today by visiting emplifi.io/demo.

The writer is Varun Sharma, vice-president, Asia Pacific and Japan, Emplifi.