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BEST PRACTICES FOR SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

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ADOPTION OF SOCIAL CUSTOMER CARE JUMPSWhat Department “Owns” Social Media Engagement?

The debate over which internal department “owns” social media continues with Marketing and Customer Care the clear leaders. While marketing early on took ownership of social media to protect the brand, it’s becoming clear that customers want to engage with companies for service issues over social media. To ensure a great customer experience, collaborative communication across the organization is required. McKinsey & Company even suggest an alternative is to locate social customer care in the operations function, like other customer-service channels. There they can easily scale to meet the demand of the growing number of social media interactions that in most cases receive less than 5% responses to service requests.

Source: 2013 Customer Experience Management Benchmark: Execs in the Know

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2012 VS. 2013

42%Marketing

36%Customer

Care

7%Public

Relations

15%Other

59%Of respondents have clearly defined areas of engagement for each department or content type

Divergence Customer Care gained the most ground in the ownership of social customer engagement, shifting from 10% to 36%. This trend is expected to continue, with more and more companies adopting a centralized approach to social media engagement.

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SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNEL IS OFTEN BLENDED

We have found that the larger the contact center, the larger percentage of social interactions are managed within the organization. As size of contact center increased so to was the likelihood of blending social media with other channels.

Source: Contact Center Decision Makers Guide 2014

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SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLING, BY CONTACT CENTER SIZE

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

120%

Small Medium Large Average

As part of the multichannel team that also handles telephony

As part of a dedicated multichannel team (i.e. email web chat social media, but no telephony)

We have a dedicated social media team in our contact centre

Handled by a team based outside our contact center

Handled by a third party/outsourced team

17% 16% 26% 19%

11%

9%

53%

11%

7%

16%

52%

17%

10%

28%

28%

8%

9%

17%

45%

10%

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SOCIAL RESPONSE TIME EXPECTATIONS HIGH Not Responding in a Timely Fashion, is NOT an Option

We have seen over and over again the damage inflicted upon a brand by not responding in a timely manner if at all to their customers request for assistance. It is important to engage over social media and to manage the customers expectations.

Less than one hour Half a day (6 hours) one day (24 hours)

1-2 days Over 2 days

28% 22% 28%

6% 2% 14%

11%

I wouldn’t expect a response

Immediate

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FOUR CRITICAL STEPS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA INTEGRATIONThe Customer Engagement Challenge

To be truly effective, organizations must create an integrated approach to social media that includes customer service and have fundamentally powerful business benefits.

Through true integration, companies do not only gain the ability to listen to consumer sentiment about their brands, but they can prioritize these sentiments to determine the appropriate actions, engage with consumers as never before possible, and integrate the resulting interactions across marketing, customer service, and various other customer touchpoints to deliver a truly satisfying customer experience.

To realize this opportunity, a sequential set of 4 development phases is required comprised of best practices that can help companies build unbreakable customer loyalty and great customer experience.

Monitoring Analytics Omnichannel Engagement

Social Enable Enterprise

1 2 3 4

Monitor what matters: To be successful listeners, a brand must gain visibility into content communities, and strategize ways to capture consumer sentiment about products, the services provided, and the level of emotional engagement that exists with the brand.

Capture customer profiles: Capturing customers’ social media handles/profile information (their Facebook or Twitter profile names, for instance), so specific comments, questions, and concerns can be tied directly to actual customers or prospects — thus enabling a proactive and personalized response, if warranted, to be much more productive.

1. MONITORINGGo Beyond Social Monitoring to Understand and Influence Consumer Sentiment

Today, there are various approaches being used to monitor social media. Some brands employ interns to conduct Google searches to determine if what’s being said about the brand is worthy of escalation to management. Some brands use sophisticated monitoring services that track comments, trends, and geographies. Still others deploy entire social media “command centers” to track tens of thousands of daily social media posts spanning hundreds of thousands of sites around the globe.

But questions arise: Who is doing the listening, and are they truly qualified to assess the significance of what they hear? Who are they listening to? What are they listening for? And how will that information be analyzed and put to use? The goal should be much more than just the monitoring and visualization of trends across the social sphere. This is not just about information; it’s about knowledge and decision support. Some approaches to consider:

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Enhance the quality of engagement by gaining insight into missed actionable opportunities

Understand user intention

Identify trends around issues, problems, questions, value gain and team performance

Easily filter and prioritize data

“Quickly cut through the noise to avoid the social blind spot”

2. ANALYTICSHow do You Filter Out the Noise to Find the Messages that Matter?

Managing customer interactions over social media carries unique challenges for companies, particularly as the volume and breadth of social interactions continues to grow daily. Frequently this leads to missed actionable messages and opportunities for customer engagement. Getting caught in the social blind spot can result in customer churn and decreased brand loyalty. Frustrated customers often will expose company responses or misinformation via social media, which can erode brand reputation, lower Net Promoter Scores, and Increase Customer Effort.

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3. OMNICHANNEL ENGAGEMENTDriving Context Aware, Personalized Customer Engagement

True social media engagement is about connecting reactively and proactively with customers and prospects in the most appropriate manner. The ability of companies to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience across customer interactions is only as good as their data. Those that continue to rely on disconnected channels, keeping their data in operational silos, are failing to extract the inherent value of their knowledge about their customers. By failing to enable a unified view of the customer across channels and touchpoints, companies aren’t capitalizing on the context they can bring to each interaction, and are instead providing the same set of generic interactions that inevitably lead to a poor customer experience. By effectively leveraging a customer’s context—purchase history, recent interactions, past service issues, unfinished processes, etc.—and combining this with effective business rules, companies can deliver a more satisfying customer experience.

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Source: “Omnichannel Customer Care,” Aberdeen Group, October 2013

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Research by Aberdeen Group reveals that companies with well-coordinated omnichannel customer experience programs outperform their peers with asynchronous customer engagement efforts in key performance areas such as customer rentention, average profit margin per customer, and customer lifetime value.

THE BUSINESS VALUE OF OMNICHANNEL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PROGRAMS

-2%

0%

2%

4%

6%

8%

Companies with omnichannel Customer Experience Management programs

6.5%

3.4%

6.1%

1.0%

3.4%

-0.7%

Customer retention Average profit margin per customer Percent of

respondents, n=305

Customer lifetime value

All Others

Get multi-modal so infrastructures can easily enable customers to cross channels. Not everything can be resolved through social media, so a seamless transition to direct human assistance may be required via another channel. The customer should feel they are having a consistent experience with the brand through each mode of communication. And those responsible for interacting within each channel should be fully informed about the entire interaction throughout.

Get real time with a single dashboard view of content, information, and trends originating from social media and other data sources that stakeholders can see, understand and use to ensure the right action is put into play by the right individuals adhering to the right business rules.

70% surveyed believe integrating social media is important. - Altimeter Group

4. SOCIAL ENABLED ENTERPRISEIntegrate the Conversation Across the Enterprise

A growing number of companies are hiring dedicated customer service representatives specifically assigned to social media, but when one or more departments establish dedicated social media teams, how are the rest of the people in the enterprise able to capture and leverage the insights they gain? The critical factor in empowering the social enterprise is a technological infrastructure capable of automating the business process transformation by capturing and prioritizing social media content and interactions as part of the customer record, escalating as needed, and routing to the appropriate person with full visibility from start to resolution. Some areas to consider are:

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48% or Less of consumers are currently happy with the customer service they’ve experienced from using social media channels.

- eDigital Reserch

END-TO-END CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Website Mobile App Contact Center Back Office Branch

Purchase Journey

Onboarding Journey

Account Change Journey

Problem Resolution Journey

Renewal and Repurchase Journey

“

“It costs 7X more to replace a customer than to keep one”

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SUMMARYIntegration of Social Media and Customer Service is No Longer Optional

Failure to do so results in marketing or other departments trying to address issues that are outside their area of expertise. Or, it results in duplicative efforts from both marketing and customer service to resolve issues without one knowing what the other is doing. For the customer journey, the disconnected response is likely to create an unsatisfactory resolution that can have a disastrous effect on a brand’s reputation as word spreads online. Most important of all, failure to harness the power of social media /customer service integration means severely limiting the effectiveness of any social media operation to bring true value to your brand and its customers. Beyond just the customer’s perspective, whether it’s reduced waste, less legal liability, or more personalized customer care, this integration can make a tremendous difference to your bottom line. According to McKinsey & Company, on average, handling an inbound call typically costs a company $6 - $8; an interaction using socil media, less than $1.

In a competitive marketplace, companies that understand and capitalize on the power of social media integration with customer service operations will take control of their industries. Before long, this integration won’t just be the stuff of competitive advantage, it will be the cost of entry. Smart brands will start bolstering their position — and banking the rewards — now.

TAKE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Industry leaders have achieved amazing results with the Genesys Social Media Solution for Customer Service such as:

An integrated approach to social media turns engagement opportunities into real business benefits. Genesys is helping enable the social enterprise by establishing social media as a customer service touchpoint, ensuring that companies deliver a truly satisfying customer experience that drives loyalty.

Increase in Agent Capacity Reduction in Agent Labor Costs

Reduction in Handle Time

Increase in Agent Productivity

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50%70% 10% 12%

Website: www.genesys.com Contact Us: 1-888-GENESYS

Genesys is the market leader in multi-channel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. We help brands of all sizes make great CX great business. The Genesys Customer Experience Platform powers optimal customer journeys consistently across all touchpoints, channels and interactions to turn customers into brand advocates. Genesys is trusted by over 4,500 customers in 80 countries to orchestrate more than 100 million digital and voice interactions each day.

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