What works for social media, Twitter and other programs in customer relations?
The winners of the 2016 Customer Service Excellence Recognition Program offer tips on how to hire the right people to leverage social media and how to educate your customers…all with the end goal of obtaining top results.
MODERATOR
Nancy Fratzke, Vice President, Customer Service, U.S. Cellular
PANELISTS
Mary Hill, Manager, Customer Service and Social Media, StubHub
Melissa Hueman, Director, Customer Success, Rocana
Michelle Mattson, Director, Social Media Care, T-Mobile
Ken Mirch, Director, Member Services, Dollar Shave Club
SESSION ABSTRACT
The winners of the 2016 Customer Service Excellence Recognition Program are
unveiled and their success stories were brought to life in a series of interviews and discussions.
INTRODUCTION
The winners of the Customer Service Excellence Recognition Program offered some tips on how to leverage social media and obtain top results:
• Hire the right people
• Educate your customers
• If you work with social media, you must respond in less than 10 minutes
• For security, most of the companies work behind firewalls
Mary Hill, Manager, Customer Service and Social Media, StubHub
The company makes sure customers are educated about its programs and about its online services. They are always examining their brand and customer base. They take pride in having a results-driven approach to managing social media. They are pro-active and the customer service department has a partnership with the company’s marketing department. The company’s customer service team is trained to understand the lifecycle of products.
Melissa Hueman, Director, Customer Success, Rocana
This Omni Channel customer experience winner said they have hired the right people to lead their customer service programs. The two-year old company keeps tabs on the nuances of how its customers are using its technology. They take a proactive role in introducing and managing new technology, keeping an eye out for what the customer wants. Above all, they have a staff prepared to answer questions from customers. They have a high-touch model and look at everything from a 3 P’s perspective: Proactive, Process and People. The company’s technology is complex, and the customer service team is constantly being trained in the features used by customers.
Michelle Mattson, Director, Social Media Care, T-Mobile
The T-Mobile Social Media Care team is made up of 200 professionals who work 24-7. The key for this company is to stay innovative and respond to customer requests in less than 10 minutes. They have patterns of response. They make sure they own the experience. They personalize their social media relationship with their customers. They monitor their call volume to stay on top of trends and movements.
Ken Mirch, Director, Member Services, Dollar Shave Club
This California company makes its online customer service a key component of its business. The company tailors its customer service message to the specific social media channel. It is considered a cardinal sin to switch channels on the customer. They keep the customer on the channel that the customer uses to engage with them. They aim to keep the customer experience simple, for now.
Question and Answer Highlights
Question: Regarding technical support via Twitter, we are trying to expand our Twitter usage…Do you transfer tweets to email support? And how do you figure out staffing for social media?
Answer: Technical support is a large driver because if you are tweeting using the phone, you are having issues staying on channel. Most people are tech savvy enough to know this and have already used the internet to sort out the worst part of their problem and can tweet on-channel to fine tune.
Be sure to focus on response time, monitor your busy time, and plan to staff up team support. Understand that social media is very different than legacy technical support. Possessing the right skill set and training for that skill set is critical. It takes time to have the right agent who can support multi-tasking tweets and chat, and know when to pick up the phone and not get flustered.
What have you built to have informed agents? Personalized agents for personalized seamless experiences?
We are complex. We have instituted Jive software for each customer, support tickets that everyone has access to, and provided internal training, complete with a robust internal portal for lookups, product releases and webinars. We also share this directly with customers who allow self-service.
We have consistent, well written, pre-approved responses that are put together before they go out. They are all approved by marketing.
We leverage Jive technology partners across peer groups and drop and drag
knowledge based snippets to offer customers.
For social media…who at your company did you have to get to buy in from?
At our company, it was the acquisition team.
We had an internal blank check to get it done!