Really interesting social service post I happened to catch recently. And roughly in line with what I’ve seen at work for the past 18 months.
Almost 50% of customers seek assistance via social media channels? No shock there. It’s probably lower in B2B spheres. Much higher among students and consumers.
Our social service crews cater to vast and diverse constituencies including enterprises (B2B), SMBs, Students, and consumers. So not unlike Autodesk as a global business bellwether company, our social services also taps into various swaths of social populations and behaviors. And we draw appropriate lessons - and experience - from addressing such varied market segments.
Frequency of social service requests is an interesting figure. Does it mean you have significant product or service issues? Or does it mean you’ve done a really good jobs building a “humanized” conversational front-end to your brand? Or all of the above?
We do get a small set of rather frequent “engagers” on Twitter. We don’t see this on other channels as much. The most persistent ones are either professionals or students. Bless their hearts - we’ve actually made real “friends” in both communities. And truth be told, some portions of our online engagements are indeed purely conversational. Sometimes even emotional. I like that.
Response “effectiveness” has been a real focus point for us because we realize that “engagement velocity” alone is not enough. It’s nice to acknowledge customers within minutes of a problem. But it’s even nicer to actually resolve their issue and “close” the deal, as we used to say in sales.
And in social service, there are a lot of deal makers but few “closers”. This is likely why people rate social service as “ineffective” - a placebo of sorts. In the “old days” customer service would close cases from an internal perspective. In other words, a support rep would decide that the case was resolved and close it. Pretty normal since auditing usually revolves around case closure rates (a questionable metric if you ask me).
But I find that approach less than ideal in social support. Why? Because on social channels it’s easy to get a “confirmed hit” by asking the customer straight-up in real time. So not doing so is lazy at best, IMO. Why assume when you can be sure?
It’s true that doing it outside-in affects deflection metrics - you “deflect” less cases because people don’t always get back to you - or they “hit and run” with a question, and you never know what the outcome was. But intellectually, I feel better using “resolved” if, and only if, the customer confirmed it was or inferred resolution is unambiguous to any reasonable observer.
I’m convinced this approach greatly improves overall customer experience (instant response time or not) and corresponding NPS scores. I also know it makes “deflection” scores look worse internally - at least initially - but we should be in this business to improve customer experience. Not beef up pretty internal dashboards. Social service is a tough gig. It punishes shortcuts.
Stay social my friends :)
Really compelling blog post from ex Samsung Social Media Marketing Manager (now a welcomed addition to the Sprinklr team) Esteban Contreras interviewing one of my evangelist heroes Guy Kawasaki.
I love the last question in particular - a classic Guy “make meaning” formula - that in order to “change the world”, you really need to:
“Build something that you want to use. Prototype your product or service as quickly as you can. Don’t write a business plan, create a pitch, or craft a financial forecast. Get it out there. See if people will really use it. For God’ sake, don’t do market research.”
I really love this advice. Especially coming from a venture capitalist :)
At Autodesk, our own mantra is “Helping people imagine, design, and create a better world”. And my organization, Customer Service and Support, is the “help” piece of that equation.
Inherently, our mission is to ensure people move along their imagine, design, and create workflow with minimal friction and interruption. It’s that simple. And this is part of our “social service at scale” vision.
And as our software is used to prototype and release all sorts of products in every imaginable industry as quickly and efficiently as possible, I like to think we contribute to “changing the world” in the Kawasaki sense of things.
Which makes me feel kinda good :)
Scalability, shcalability! I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept lately. Especially when applied to customer care. Why? Because every so often I encounter a support feature and think to myself “Wow! Now that’s a really cool idea!
Case in point: this instant screen cast feature from Sprinklr support or this remote support deal from Samsung.
But then right after that, the little voice of “business reason” goes “right, but come on, you can’t scale this to millions of customers!” - but perhaps this is the wrong way to look at this. Totally wrong.
Because one doesn’t always deal with “millions of customers” at once. Matter of fact, chances are at any one time you’re only dealing with (hopefully) a tiny chunk of your customer base. And given that, chances are it’s possible to offer “personalized” one-one service after all. We know that’s where the NPS gold sits.
Tying this in to social media. Where personally influencing a small core of folks becomes way more important than trying to be “everything” to a mass market audiences - those days are long gone. How many loving fans would you create by offering something like the services above? How many friends would they tell?
What if you let them email support reps or community managers directly? How about product managers? Heck. if I can get an instant chat with screen share for support from any company, they’ve converted me for ever. No questions asked.
This whole scalability thing is probably scarier than it should be. One-on-one contact can be golden when shareable. You can’t do that with 10,000,000 customers at the same time for sure. But you can do it with small carefully selected groups.
Because it’s doing it often enough with the right subset at the right time that matters. Let your community worry about scaling. Let them do the leg work. Just focus on wowing customers one at a time. Don’t worry so much about scaling stuff.
Sarah Goodall twitted a really insightful social media report from McKinsey a short while ago. The five page document is extensive, but only two of the charts (pictured here) really surprised me.
The first one on page 2 (Exhibit 3) tells me that customer satisfaction is the least impacted benefit since 2009 (3 point delta). No good. However that’s just a hair under “Reducing marketing costs” - these tell me that (1) most still haven’t figured out how to use this social stuff to make customers happier and (2) we’re still underestimating the costs of doing social.
The second one on page 5 (Exhibit 7) is a little more shocking to me. Why? As the report notes:
“…the greatest number say their companies use these tools to scan the external environment for new ideas”
Which tells me that innovation is not coming from internal resources! If companies are scanning outwardly for new ideas, they’re not tapping their own people. Or their own people have no innovative ideas - which I find unlikely. Or maybe companies are also tapping internally, but clearly not using social media technologies to do so. I find that disturbing.
