In this new world, it is our responsibility as business leaders to keep driving innovation within our organisations to effectively service customers across all channels including social media support.
We’ve all seen a massive shift to social media as a channel for customer engagement with as much as a 100% increase in volume in many industry sectors over the past 6 months.
This has given rise for the need to build highly effective models of engagement, bringing operational efficiency, convenience and innovation resulting in the delivery of an exceptional customer experience through contact centres by effectively prioritising customers’ social media conversations.
I personally have seen the need to implement new thinking, processes and technology a lot quicker than ever before – procrastination in driving the necessary innovation will leave you a step behind your customers, giving the competitive advantage to those who embrace the change to alternative channels.
Agility and flexibility in designing new business strategies is critical – it is not the time for perfection because we are all navigating through unknown territory, but now is rather the time to be prepared to pilot new processes and technology to optimise the customer experience.
A key component of success is the combination of smart technology to support social media channels and humanising the interaction using the capability of highly skilled teams to drive exceptional customer experience.
With the introduction of our social media engagement and response handling platform to address the rapid growth in online customer requests and complaints, we are able to stay on top of our customer engagement and are available to our customers on whichever channel they need to communicate with us on.
3 key focus areas are:
- Channel Management – Our customers are all online and a proactive social media strategy is imperative to mitigate risk, improve customer satisfaction and increase customer retention. An omni-channel solution is a fundamental part of this process.
- Prioritisation – Unhappy clients will move elsewhere, so it is important to address your high-risk conversations with context, proficiency, and professionalism. Prioritisation tagging is the main criteria in taking your customers through the right journey. These tags include: Risk – mentions that pose an immediate risk to the reputation of your brand Purchase – mentions that indicate engagement with a prospective client Cancel – mentions that indicate a cancellation request Service – mentions that indicate a customer query or customer experience feedback
- Analytics – the numbers help us all to keep getting better, to understand what our customers are really telling us so we can address the underlying issues and build relevant strategies. You need to be asking yourself:
- Are my response times as effective as they could be to drive the positive engagement and first time query resolution my customers are looking for?
- Are my social media team effectively prioritising high value client conversations?
- Are my teams able to engage with my customers across multiple channels?