Social Interactions Deliver a Service Edge by SCRM SCRM

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Social Interactions Deliver a

Service Edge

Customer insight gleaned from conversations in the social sphere will give organizations a competitive edge in service.

Accent................................................................. 3 The Social Experience

eGain................................................................... 4 Harvesting Social Knowledge for Customer Service

Social Interactions Deliver a Service Edge Customer insight gleaned from conversations in the social sphere will give organizations a competitive edge in service.

ustomers have plenty to say online about brands, companies, and customer experiences. And they have plenty of places to say it: blogs and micro-blogs, communities and forums, social networks, and so on. Industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group recently cited some jaw-dropping statistics: According to Nielsen three of the most popular brands online are Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia—and consumers across the globe currently spend more than 110 billion minutes on social networking sites and blogs. “This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes,” Owyang wrote in his blog, Web Strategy. The numbers of people visiting social networks and blogs increased by 24 percent over last year, he said. Many companies are listening to the chatter on these sites; some are even joining the conversation. But too few are taking what they’ve learned and using it to their advantage. It’s a potentially huge missed opportunity. Customer insight gathered from social settings can Social knowledge inform R&D and marketing, can help to improve products and processes, and can even aid and interaction help in shortening sales cycles. Most important, it can help organizations take a more proactive companies build approach to service, potentially lowering costs in the process. What’s more, once customadvocacy, engageers see that an organization is taking action on what it is learning, they’re likely to form a ment, and loyalty, better opinion of that company, purchase more or more frequently, and recommend the as well as improve firm to friends and associates. In other words, social knowledge and interaction help combusiness potential. panies build advocacy, engagement, and loyalty, as well as improve business potential. While this all sounds enticing, it’s not so simple to just dive in and reap the rewards. Organizations need a carefully crafted social strategy that aligns well with overall business goals, marketing objectives, and service targets. It should include everything from identifying and engaging influencers to prioritizing service resolution and uncovering opportunities to optimizing social’s full potential. This is no easy feat. In the pages that follow, industry insiders Accent and eGain examine how to weave social strategies throughout the organization to improve customer service and enhance business outcomes. They offer specific plans for turning social knowledge into organizational power.

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The Social Experience Revolutionizing the Contact Center to Engage, Influence and Monetize Every Customer Interaction

et’s face it — the customer relationship has changed. In today’s digital, social and interactive world, consumers want access to companies on their own terms. While phone and web channels remain vital to customer service, consumers are increasingly seeking assistance through social communities as well. Whether adding a compliment to a brand’s Facebook wall, tweeting about a negative customer experience or posting a customer service question through a user forum — the social consumer now controls the conversation. But marketers aren’t completely powerless. Every time a customer interacts with your brand, you have an opportunity to influence repeat purchase behavior, shape brand perceptions and create brand advocates for life. And that’s where the contact center comes in. In an era where companies are still trying to figure out their social engagement strategy, harnessing the power of the contact center to transform customer service touchpoints across phone, online and social channels may sound like a daunting task. But with careful planning, you can consistently and repeatedly drive ROI while improving customer lifetime value across the social channel.

Listen Start by monitoring the web and assessing the social landscape for sentiment, issues and popular topics of discussion. By tracking the social conversation, you’ll gain a better understanding of your customers’ questions, concerns, needs and wants – all while bringing critical issues and opportunities to your attention so they can be quickly addressed before going viral.

Learn Now that you know what’s being said about your brand, you need to understand who’s saying it. Evaluate the social landscape to determine your brand influencers, advocates, antagonists and celebrities. How many followers do they have? Have they reached out

to you before across other communications channels? Have you captured previous transactional and behavioral data from them? By taking a moment to better understand the social consumer through the use of data and advanced analytics techniques, you’ll uncover valuable insight to help inform your customer engagement strategy.

Connect Once you have a complete view of the social customer, you’re now ready to join the conversation - responding in real time to inquiries and complaints through an engaging and personal conversation that is transparent, timely and consistent with your brand. But don’t forget to help your customers, partners and dealers connect to each other as well. By establishing support and innovation communities, you’re encouraging community members to contribute ideas, share experiences and offer advice.

Influence The goal of any engagement is to strengthen the consumer’s level of involvement and intimacy with your brand. While the days of controlling the marketing message are long gone, brands still have the power to improve customer sentiment and increase customer lifetime value by turning a negative experience into a positive one. Best of

all, by positively influencing the social consumer, word of mouth will spread and pay dividends long after the initial customer interaction is over.

Optimize To ensure each customer interaction is more intelligent and engaging than the last, continuously refine and enhance the social experience. Update your knowledge base with real-time information that can be accessed by your customers across web and social channels as well as by marketing, customer care and PR teams. Apply quality monitoring techniques to benchmark each interaction against your defined customer experience. And use information captured to inform product, marketing and customer service decisions while gaining a more thorough understanding of your customers and the reasons why they interact with you. By following this simple process, you’ll help ensure your brand remains strong, relevant and a valuable asset. After all, the most important customer interaction is the one that’s going to happen next. Are you ready? g

ACCENT Marketing Services, LLC ACCENT, a member of the MDC Partners Network, is the performance marketing company for marketers who need to maximize their brand’s ability to engage with consumers and influence behavior, while generating a better return on their investment. The company’s data-driven approach transforms customer service touchpoints across the phone, online and social media channels into powerful relationship and brand-building tools. For more information about ACCENT, visit http://www.accentonline.com or call 866.623.0018.

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Harvesting Social Knowledge for Customer Service

1. Assess the opportunity Start by assessing the opportunity for social knowledge harvesting. Consider the nature of the business (e.g. B2B, B2C etc.). It is easier to attain “critical mass” with more contributors and less specialized knowledge in B2C sectors. This means a bigger harvesting opportunity in B2C than in B2B (see Figure 1). Also look at the type of customer queries received. Inquiries fall into four categories— informational, transactional, diagnostic, and advisory. Informational and transactional queries tend to be of low-to-moderate complexity, while diagnostic and advice-seeking queries are often of moderate-to-high complexity. Informational and transactional queries, therefore, are more likely to be resolved by social knowledge. 2. Identify high-value knowledge Not all social knowledge contributors are equal! Determine their Social Knowledge Value™ (SKV) by considering reputation, prolificacy, and influence, which most social networking tools measure (number of posts,

Figure 1: eGain Social Knowledge

TM Figure Opportunity 1: eGain Social Knowledge MatrixOpportunity

Matrix™

High

Low

Moderate

Figure 2: eGain Knowledge Harvesting &

Figure 2: eGain Knowledge Harvesting & Customer Customer Service Framework

Service Framework™

Deep Dive, Gold Service

Deep Dive, Platinum Service

Omit, Self-Service

Scoop, Platinum Service

LOW

SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE VALUE

HIGH

Low B2C

ommunity-based knowledge creation for customer service is not new. However, enabled by the ubiquity and of the Web and the availability of social networking tools, it has reached a whole new level, leading to the coining of the term “social knowledge.” While more prevalent in B2C sectors, social knowledge is also starting to matter in B2B sectors. How can companies harvest the best of social knowledge for use in their contact centers and service organizations? And, how should they engage with customers on social websites? The following five-step plan increases the odds of success in harvesting social knowledge for customer service. With this approach, social knowledge is bound to add significant value in the form of improved customer loyalty, enhanced brand equity, lower cost of knowledge creation, and reduced customer service costs.

B2B

HIGH COMPLEXITY

(DIAGNOSTIC & ADVICE QUERIES)

LOW COMPLEXITY

(INFORMATIONAL & TRANSACTIONAL QUERIES)

acceptance rate, number of connections, etc.). Knowledge from high-SKV contributors is ideal for “deep dive” harvesting, while that from low-SKV contributors can be ignored or skimmed (see Figure 2). 3. Engage current customers Customers are key to the initiative, both as knowledge contributors and posters of queries. Resolve queries posted on social sites quickly because of the broad market exposure. Be especially responsive if they are from high lifetime financial value customers, whom you provide “platinum service” (e.g. proactive offer to chat, rapid service levels, etc.). High-financial-value customers who are high-SKV contributors not only present an opportunity for deep-dive knowledge harvesting but are also important for collaborative product development. See Figure 2 for a framework for knowledge harvesting as part of customer service strategy. 4. Harvest and unify Make sure that social knowledge goes through the same robust quality control processes as internally-generated knowledge, so that it can be made part of a common multichannel knowledge base. Likewise, social customer interactions should be added to

LOW

LIFETIME FINANCIAL VALUE

HIGH

other multichannel interactions as part of a unified Customer Interaction Hub (CIH), which consolidates interactions, knowledge, business rules, analytics, and administration in one place for better customer experience, service consistency, and process efficiencies. The hub approach allows agents to view customers’ social interactions, in addition to direct interactions with the business, for rapid resolution. 5. Account for sector-specific and legal factors Social monitoring tools, social knowledge, and robust customer service compliance workflows can help businesses in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products to track adverse incident reports and act on them rapidly in compliance with regulations. And, make sure you are not violating copyright laws while harvesting content from social websites. g

About eGain eGain is a leading provider of cloud and on-site customer interaction hub software for unified multichannel customer service and KM. Visit http://www.egain.com.

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ACCENT Marketing Services 400 Missouri Avenue, Suite 100 Jeffersonville, IN 47130 866.623.0018 cmeehan@accentonline.com www.accentonline.com

eGain Communications Corporation 345 E. Middlefield Road, Mountain View, CA 94043 US: (800) 821-4358 EMEA: +44-(0)1753-464646 info@egain.com www.egain.com

Look for these additional 1to1 In Action Series: Topic

Publish Date

Analytics............................................................................................ May 23 Customer Feedback Management.................................................... June 27 Customer Loyalty.............................................................................. September 26 Marketing Automation....................................................................... October 24 Multichannel Customer Service........................................................ November 28

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