(PART2)
Part one of our “Social Media as a Customer Service Differentiator” blog series explored how a lack of cross-functional collaboration can impede a brand’s ability to deliver superior experiences, resulting in increased customer friction and missed opportunities for conversational commerce.
It also highlighted ways that the marketing and customer care organizations can break down their operational silos to transform social media into a full-service channel. While having the right governance model in place is a pivotal first step towards achieving legendary social media care, without a comprehensive platform for social listening, engagement, and automation, brands will struggle to keep pace with demand in 2023.
In part two of our blog series, VXI Global Solutions introduces the second mission critical objective to implement for your social engagement and servicing teams this year – selecting the right SaaS tool.
Objective 2: Make sure you are leveraging the right SaaS tool across the enterprise A common pitfall that many organizations fall into is purchasing too many point solutions to help solve for individual challenges across functional areas, instead of optimizing a single tool and encouraging cross-functional collaboration.
It’s something our advisory team at VXI observes frequently when evaluating a brand’s social media technology stack. Often upwards of a million dollars can be cut from the budget by simply consolidating tools and selecting the right SaaS platform to streamline workflows. The ideal social media management platform captures conversations, filters, and sorts through the noise with the help of AI, automates workflows for determining urgency, and leverages intelligent routing to get the most impactful mentions to the right team at the right time. If your social listening and engagement platforms are two separate tools, it’s time to downsize.
To make matters worse, having too many tools can lead to disparate measurement and reporting practices across the organization. Social NPS and sentiment scores are two examples of KPIs that need to be reviewed by the collective team – not in functional silos.
Example: If a product has just been launched and sentiment scores are trending down, customer care teams are often the first line of sight into the issues that need to be addressed. While marketing and PR teams are inclined to publish public apologies, too many “I’m sorry” messages on social media will only fuel the flames when it comes to diffusing negative sentiment scores. Instead, customer care teams can assist marketing by responding with positive engagement methods and higher response rates. When operating from the same tool and reporting infrastructure, a more productive conversation can be had around how the proactive content and the reactive servicing strategies are working together to create the best experience for the customer.
As mentioned above, most comprehensive SaaS platforms for social media management include artificial intelligence capabilities. AI can help teams gain efficiencies by removing spam, retweets, articles, and conversations that don’t always warrant a response. Automation also plays a pivotal role in enabling organizations to handle and respond to an ever-growing volume of mentions. Through both keywords and context, an automated rules-based engine can route the right post to the right team member, prioritizing the content by criticality and impact. Brands who deliver legendary care on social media have taken the time to learn how to leverage these capabilities to gain efficiencies, optimize costs, and reduce flush rates to improve their reach and create a superior service experience.
Speak with our Social Media Experts Are you only scratching the surface of what a full-fledged social customer care strategy can do for your brand? If your teams need help getting started, or are stuck trying to improve high flush rates, low sentiment scores, and long response times, don’t wait.
After all, even social media gurus need help operationalizing legendary. Trust us, we know, our partners include some of the world’s most disruptive brands – even leading social networking companies. Contact us for a quick chat or consultation.
About VXI’s CX Advisory Group At VXI we are passionate about helping our partners rethink, reimagine, and revive traditional customer engagement models. It’s why we offer a team of domain experts who specialize in everything from experience design to digital transformation and program management within the contact center. Our practice leaders are pioneers of the experience economy and have helped leading Fortune 500 brands leverage CX as a competitive advantage and opportunity for ongoing value creation.
