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In a blog post on the Salesforce UX Medium channel, Kristen Muramoto and Kathy Baxter talked about the importance of social customer support (SCS), as well as the research and design work we have done to provide an optimal SCS experience for our customers. In this post, we’d like to share specific strategies for creating a SCS experience your customers will love!
1. Identify an owner.
It can be contentious if Marketing and Customer Support both believe they should own their brand’s social presence. If this is the case, set clear policies to avoid duplicative and/or contradictory responses/posts.
2. Develop deep expertise
The owner must develop expertise and stay current on developments in social media, social customer support, and its tools. For example, what are the latest developments with chatbots and are they right for your customer support?
3. Be where your customers are
Search social media (e.g., Tweetdeck) for mentions of your company or brand and allocate your resources to those. Concentrate on your organization’s most popular channels to scope resources and avoid being overwhelmed.
4. Make a playbook
A “playbook” is the set of rules/policies regarding who can engage with which customers about what. What are the rules for engagement? Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) make sense for social and your company? What is your social voice and tone? What is your SLA and hours of support for social?
5. Train your agents for social customer service
Copy/pasting template text won’t fly on social. You don’t want to sound like a robot and it can take skill to respond to complex or emotional issues in a limited space without sounding curt. Familiarize your agents with the codes of conduct of various social networks. Agents must also know when to take a public tweet or Facebook post to private direct message.
6. Employ Social Studio to listen to your social channels
Social Studio is the social media listening tool that communicates with Social Hub. These features analyze and engage agents to receive and respond to cases efficiently.
7. Set up automation rules in Social Hub to reduce “noise”
Salesforce Social Hub helps your agents focus on important issues. It allows you to create rules to automate categorization and routing, triage incoming posts, and only create cases on actionable requests for help, positive and negative sentiments, etc.
8. Optimize workflow with the Social Publisher and Social Lookup sidebar
Admins can implement specific layouts with components like social publishers and the Social Lookup sidebar to optimize workflow efficiency.
9. Streamline support with tools like Omni-Channel, Knowledge and Macros
These tools streamline the workflow for agents, allowing them to resolve social cases faster.
Salesforce Service Console for SCS
A breakdown of the Service Console
10. Learn and improve.
Social Customer Support is not “set & forget.” It takes time to see how customers respond, assess their expectations, and understand what they want in social support. Effective social support requires adjustments to your categorization of hashtags and sentiment analysis. Study your KPIs, customer feedback, and agent feedback. Adjust your playbook, implement, and iterate again.
This post was written in collaboration with Kristen Muramoto and based on the research byDemi Boe.
