Building Blocks for a Social Media Customer Engagement Strategy

...Continued from previous post - Press 1 for Twitter

Building a Social Customer Engagement strategy is becoming increasingly important for enterprises, however, enterprises need to be wary of the challenges that come with a social media customer service channel. Social Customer Engagement is fairly new, and is unlike the other customer service processes where we have metrics, benchmarks and best practices to improve our processes. Including Social Media channels as part of the customer service process requires a thorough assessment of the customer base & existing customer contact processes, and the need to build a new set of processes & programs.

Key building blocks for a social media customer engagement strategy would include:-

a) Define Objectives
It is important to clearly state the objective for having a social media customer engagement strategy. Is it to disseminate information, engage with customers in conversations, pro-actively offer support or collaborate on ideas? Once we define the objectives, then the other aspects of the strategy can be explored.

b) Identify Social Channel
An assessment of the customer base and the objectives should define which social channels should be used. Different social channels serve different objectives. Twitter is good for broadcasting messages, promoting discount offers, and quick in-the-moment customer support. So Twitter is a good channel if you have a customer or partner community to broadcast pertinent information, and also respond to customer queries and conversations. Facebook on the other hand is better for customer collaboration and rich media sharing. If the objective is to engage with customers and collaborate with them on ideas, then a channel like Facebook is more apt. The option of creating your own social network or social platform for customers to communicate with one another & with the enterprise also serves the same objective. Using channels such as Youtube is good either in tech support environments where product demos, or troubleshooting videos can be shared. The objective in this case would be product support & training. Other social channels such as Wikis & Blogs are also effective, if the customer requires more deeper information into the query.
Like the multi-channel approach in today's contact center, the best approach for social channels would also be to choose a few channels rather than one channel, and target different customer groups.

c) Define Social Media Engagement Process

Any social media customer engagement strategy will require active participation on social channels. In order to ensure active participation, there needs to be clarity on (1) Content Creation process and (2) the Social Participation policy.

Content Creation process involves deciding who creates the content that needs to be posted on social channels to respond and engage with customers. Should the PR teams be involved, or is Marketing supposed to take the lead if it is product specific, or should there be a separate team within the contact center that is empowered to respond to social media queries/issues? It is important to have a process that can deliver quick responses to these queries. While social media is not like a live voice call with a 2-5 minute response time, the expectation of response time on social channels would be within a day, if not a few hours (depending on the nature of the query; the process of screening mentioned above will also help determine the urgency of response). Including Training & Knowledge base for social media responses to help expedite the response process would also be critical.

Social Participation policy, similar to the content creation process, is about identifying who is authorized to post/participate on behalf of the enterprise - Is there a need to have a separate pool of empowered agents for this task or would the PR team be involved? The creation of a consistent social front for the enterprise i.e. a twitter account, facebook page, youtube channel, etc. would also be part of this process.

d) Participate - Listen, Screen & Engage
Once the social channels have been established, the next step is to participate in conversations. The recommendation here is to first listen to what are customers talking about, what are the negatives & positives, what products/services are in discussion, which customer segments are active, etc. Once we Listen to these conversations, the next step would be to Screen which conversations require participation - which customer segments, which negatives, which product/service areas, etc. After the screening process, comes the important step of Engaging with the customer. In order to Engage, the enterprise should be able to respond to comments directly, post messages on social networking sites, and provide a regularly updated blog/wiki for future references.

This process of Listen, Screen & Engage is being enabled by several emerging technologies that can be embedded into existing contact center environments of some leading vendors. The ability to have a queue of social media queries or cases, and being routed to available agents can be achieved by emerging technologies. However, as is the case with most innovations, the barrier is not the technology but the process.

e)Measure & Monitor

The last and very important step is measuring the impact of social interactions and monitoring the feedback, revenues or other target metrics. ROI for social media is a topic of high interest these days. Different enterprises enter social media for different reasons, and hence their approach to justify the time and resources is very different. Some ways of measuring success of a social media engagement strategy can be (i) measuring the extended customer reach & community (i.e. number of followers or fans), (ii) track increase in search engine volumes, (iii) track the success of promotions that are delivered via the social channels, (iv) track user comments to see shift in customer perception of the enterprise brand.
It is important to have a clear idea on the objectives so that one can work towards measuring & monitoring whether the objectives are being met or not. There are several free and paid tools available to monitor activity on social channels that can be used to help enterprise contact centers monitor social media customer engagement & interactions.

These building blocks will help define a clear strategy for social media engagement with customers. As enterprises embark on their very first journey of engaging with customers on social channels, one must be aware some of the challenges that exist today:-

1) Many Social Channels - There are many social channels, and hence the need to integrate the channels, and use different channels for different customer segments & functions. Focus on core social channels that are applicable to your customer base.
2) Half-Hearted Approach - There are quite a few enterprises who are embarking on social media customer engagement strategies only because "everyone else is on it". A half-hearted approach could have a severe backlash as well. Once a social channel for customer interaction has been established, quick response and frequent updates are critical to sustain the channel.
3) Silo-ed Approach to Social Media - Discussion of embarking on social media is happening by different teams within the same enterprise. The Marketing team, the Corporate Communications/Public Relations (PR) team, as well as the Customer Service/Contact Center team are all looking to experiment with social media. If this social channel is opened by any of these teams, it has an impact on the other team as well. Despite that, these teams are not actively talking to each other to bring forth a common social media strategy.
4) Early Days, Lack of Standards - Social media is a recent phenomena, and there are no standards that have been set in terms of technology or processes. Hence, one can expect some teething trouble for enterprises that embark on this journey.

Having a Social Media Customer engagement strategy will no longer be a choice in 2011-2012. Early adopters have already embarked on this journey in 2009. In the Asia Pacific region as well, enterprises have started to use social media to connect & engage with their customers. 2010 will definitely see more activity from enterprises to experiment with social channels, and by 2011-2012 one can expect best practices and standard technology applications to emerge that will drive the industry forward.