Blog

I was recently asked to contribute to a piece on customer service and social media measurement for the IAB Social Media Handbook. As usual my piece went way beyond the 500 word limit so you can see the abridged version here or the full one below.

The Customer Service ‘Iceberg’

Consumers are using social media to share, complain, praise and recommend on a daily basis. The vast majority of customer service issues occur and are dealt with via “closed” channels such as the phone, email, etc. These issues are below the water line where the wider public and media can’t see them, and this is where companies currently fix their gaze and resources. This is natural and correct. Who wouldn’t put most of their resources where the majority of the activity is taking place?

However, there is a large opportunity for companies wanting to tackle the above the water line (tip of the iceberg) issues that occur in the “open” channels of social media (Twitter, message boards, blogs etc.)

Publicly helping consumers with issues not only serves the individual, but the positive viral effect to their network and beyond can be tremendous. Most companies, however, are some way behind their consumers’ behaviour. There are several intertwined reasons for this disparity:

1. The plethora of social media channels where a consumer might express an opinion means companies require a tool to capture this conversation and an understanding of each of the media to enable them to converse effectively with customers.
2. Even with an understanding of the breadth of media, getting people to work across departments and tying new customer interaction data in with existing legacy systems still poses significant hurdles.
3. The vast majority of the interaction between the consumer and company happens in the public domain. The enforced transparency and openness of communication forces company cultures to be customer-centric rather than simply say they are. Cultural change takes time to permeate.
4. Customer service as a function has long established metrics and can be input/output driven. For some reason, people are letting social media muddy the waters. Return On Investment (ROI) in this instance is actually fairly simple.

When answering consumers via social media it’s key to remember the dual audience you are playing to. The primary audience is the person with the issue that needs to be addressed. The secondary audience is the network of the person with the issue. With mainstream news consistently using social media for content, this network extends beyond their immediate friends and can be vast in size and impact.

Setting Appropriate KPI’s and Benchmarks

Customer service is not always about handling complaints. Each interaction with a customer is an opportunity for the company to engage and influence, so the objectives of the activity can be varied.

All KPI’s should ideally start with a business objective; something requiring change that intrinsically affects the company’s performance in some way. Without this it will be difficult to make the activity relevant to the wider company.

Below I have placed some typical objectives in relation to customer service in social media, common associated metrics and some ideas on possible benchmarks, these being the key to making the data meaningful within a company, especially within social media. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list but it should provide a framework to relate your own experience to.

When reporting on any activity it pays to remember who the report is going to and what their frame of reference is. Senior management will want to see the business effect of what you are doing, whilst the PR Manager may be more inclined to see the narrative of conversations. Jeremiah Owyang does a great job of explaining this here.

Customers increasingly prefer to rely on their own networks for advice and recommendation. Instant answers from people they trust being infinitely preferable to a telephone call to a scripted, non-empowered environment. This is a trend exacerbated by the interconnectedness that social media propagates. The key for the company is to replicate this helpful, friendly, open and empathetic approach to their customer service whilst proving its worth in hard financial terms.

Everyone has their own customer service horror story, but few of them have a happy ending. And even fewer of those are when you’re dealing with a huge conglomerate.

But even the big boys are realising that utilising social media can completely change how their company is perceived.

If you’d have recently asked me my thoughts on BT customer service, it would have been a expletive-laden reply you wouldn’t want your kids to hear. I was having a nightmare moving house, and after promising me a “no wait switch on” with my broadband, BT then informed me it would take 10 days to get it turned on. After all that, they still managed to disconnect me 4 weeks later, after the previous occupants didn’t pay their final bill.

Cue multiple 2 hour phone calls, being passed from department to department, speaking to innumerable women named “Judith”, none of whom cared about my problem due to the  fact that it didn’t perfectly match an entry in their scripts. One department blaming another, put through to someone new and having to explain everything again, or (my bugbear) having to call back on another number, as they can’t put your call through to the right person.

So I did what any enraged hyper-connected geek would do. I got on Twitter, and had a bitch about it.

I was expecting a few @replies from followers who had similar nightmare stories. But about 10 minutes later, someone called Stephanie from @btcare Tweeted back with a simple “any way we can help?” – opening the lines of communication between customer and consumer immediately. For the sake of shortening the story, all I need to say is that within 24 hours the problem was solved, and I was kept informed every step of the way.

There are hundreds of reasons why I think this approach works better than the current call centre cancer running through the customer service industry, here’s just a few:

Multiple concurrent tickets If you check the @btcare page now, you’ll see that they have one person dealing with many problems at once. As support can be provided in an asynchronous manner, there’s no need to wait on the line while a user checks their computer , or while BT look up something on their system. So time is used effeciently by both parties, meaning more work can be done with less people.

One problem, one person Anyone who has had a customer service nightmare can relate to this – there’s nothing worse than following a problem through, and having to reiterate your problem every time you make a phonecall. With @btcare, there are two people working in shifts, so if you maintain contact over one time period, they’re likely to be fully aware of all the details of your problem.

Traceable, by both parties I got into a shouting match with a TV manufacturer once, who charged me £75 for a maintenance callout, and when I called they said “we informed you about this during our last call”. They didn’t, but there was no way I could prove it. Now, I can track the conversation on Twitter, and when it went over into my email all was saved for future prosperity.

More communication channels available I think this is my favourite. The initial outreach was done via Twitter, and private details along with error messages were sent on an email follow-up. After 24 hours, Stephanie called to see if everything was working OK. Each time, the medium perfectly matches the message, and all options are available for @btcare at all times. If I ring a call centre, we’re going to be on the phone and that’s it – limited by the constraints of the telephone.

Naysayers might think that this Twitter approach can only work one person at a time, but BT, like many companies venturing into social media, are aware of the power of word of mouth, and that active internet users are vocal both in their ferocity and their praise. Could we see the day that companies without active customer support teams working across social media are seen as those in the 90s who stuck with the Yellow Pages instead of getting a website?

If you’ve read this far (fingers crossed) I’d like to think that your opinion of BT customer service is less a faceless name in a huge call centre in India, and more Cameron and Stephanie in a little Irish town called Enniskillen. And I can only hope that this post gets filled with Google Juice, and manages to make it up those rankings so that when people do search for “BT Customer Service” they know that BT trying to fix something that is so obviously broken.