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Welcome back to our 5-part series on the The Future of Mobile and Social Customer Service!

Throughout the entire series, we’ve highlighted key industry trends and future innovations to look out for. Here’s a recap:

1. New features across top social channels and future options to lookout for
2. Our prediction on 5 social/mobile features to redefine customer service
3. 4 innovative brands leading the way in mobile and social customer service.
4. Empowering your Customer Service team to use a brand voice that builds customer rapport

In our final post, we will bring it all together and discuss 3 ways to effectively manage digital customer service, ensure happy customers and drive sales.

1. Align your entire business around digital customer service

Best-in-class organizations understand that customer service needs to be a team sport.

Kriti Kapoor, HP’s recent Global Director of Social Customer Service, described the importance of breaking down silos within and across HP to improve resolution rates and increase customer retention.

“Build a team and tribe that brings expertise in online communities, social media, technology evaluation and implementation, product management, business planning and social insights together”

Below are a few examples of how companies ensure effective customer service collaboration throughout the organization:

• Product management: Create customer support liaisons that join product-related meetings to discuss voice-of-customer feedback on recent product launches or issues to resolve
• Marketing: Consolidate marketing and customer support roles to allow a seamless sales and support experience across channels (e.g., Facebook, Twitter)
• Operations/IT: Hold periodic meetings with Operations and IT to discuss key customer efficiency and cost metrics (e.g., cost per call, handle time)

2. Identify the right digital customer service metrics to track

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”

- Peter Drucker (Thought Leader in Business Operations)

As companies begin to launch additional messaging and social channels for customer service, it is important to wipe the slate clean on traditional metrics. Take a step back and think about the metrics that uncover the true voice of your customers and ROI that other company stakeholders would be interested in.

Metrics are usually cut across two areas:

1. Customer-centric measures (e.g., customer satisfaction)
2. Productivity measures (e.g., response time)

Below are some digital customer service metrics we’ve seen best-in-class companies use:

• Contact Rate: Percentage of total customers contacting your support team (across any channel)
• First Contact Resolution Rate: Percentage of customer support issues (across any channel) resolved on first contact
• First Response Time — Average time elapsed between initial customer message and initial agent reply.
• Sentiment — A customer’s satisfaction based on the tone and content of their message
• Deflection Rate — Percent of customer conversations that are not resolved through an initial digital channel and moves to a traditional channel such as phone or email
• Cost per contact — Cost to serve a customer via phone, email, chat and social

3. Voice-of-customer insights = Increased satisfaction and smart sales

In our recent post, we discussed the data goldmine that social customer service provides companies. If analyzed effectively, voice-of-customer (VOC) data can enhance customer support and drive additional up and cross sale opportunities.

Unfortunately, this data usually stays within customer service and is not shared and acted on throughout the company. From our conversations with hundreds of customer service professionals there are two approaches to analyzing VOC insights:

• Understanding the trends in customer service messages
• Prioritizing / categorizing customer service messages

Quick solution: Many companies manually tag customer service messages within their CRM systems. Although this is a good start, there are challenges in sustaining this:

• Inconsistency in agents either forgetting to tag or using different tags than other agents
• High level — Tags are not granular enough for company stakeholders to act on

Future solution: An emerging group of companies are using machine learning to deliver automatic tagging of customer conversations across channels. This allows customer service management to easily share VOC insights (e.g. sentiment, product feedback, etc.) across the company to help grow your business and ensure happier customers.

Chatdesk is developing a product in this area. Contact us if this sounds like an interesting opportunity or you would like to be part of our Beta program!

This concludes the end of our 5-part series on the Future of Social and Mobile and Social Customer Service. To recap, here were previous topics we covered that you may want to revisit:

• Part 1: How mobile and social media can become your new 1–800 number
• Part 2: The Future — Our Prediction on 5 Social/Mobile Features to Redefine Customer Service
• Part 3: Digital Customer Service Champions — Brands Leading the Way
• Part 4: Make Social Customer Service Seamless by Using Your Company’s Brand Voice

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We love to talk about customer service so please reach out if you have any questions regarding the information discussed or you want to learn more!

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