Creating “Moments that Matter” on Social Media All too often, brands position social media customer service as the exclusive responsibility of the marketing team. Customers however have a mind of their own, challenging this notion by leveraging social media to not only shop around, but to share their experiences, report issues, and ask for help. While social media customer service has been around for nearly two decades, most brands have their marketing teams and customer care advocates operating in separate spheres, resulting in missed opportunities for value creation and increased customer friction.
Socially savvy organizations like LG
Earlier this month, VXI’s CX Advisory Leader, Lauren Kindzierski, and LG’s Senior Community Manager, Lucia Albero, highlighted the importance of leveraging the right team, creating a unified brand voice, and building an engaged workforce to keep pace with rising expectations in their joint workshop, “How to Create Legendary Social Media Customer Experiences.”
Here are a few outcomes from their workshop and Lucia’s key takeaways for helping other leaders position social media as a two-way CX platform for building meaningful brand connections.
You recently facilitated a workshop on “Creating Legendary Social Media Experiences,” at EITK’s Customer Response Summit. What were a few of your key takeaways for CX leaders? Lucia: I think one of the biggest points our session emphasized was that social media can be your most powerful customer experience platform if positioned correctly. A lot of the feedback we received was that the workshop was a great reminder that social media is a unique channel with the ability to provide added personalization that other channels can’t achieve. It’s not just about posts and branding, it’s a powerful tool to foster two-way conversations, amplify the positive, deploy conversational commerce tactics, and even troubleshoot issues in real-time.
Our intention was to make the workshop engaging and interactive, allowing other CX leaders to get hands-on experience walking through the key steps required to elevate social media engagement models and deepen customer relationships. We got a few laughs along the way as well, as we challenged our participants to decipher the voice of the customer and determine the right moment to jump in and be legendary.
What session or topic resonated the most with you? Lucia: I was happy to see so many sessions touch on the importance of employee engagement. When it comes to your social response strategy, the quality of your content and connections are heavily influenced by the strength and engagement of the collective team. If your employees aren’t happy and engaged, the customer experience will be lackluster. At LG, we believe in hiring the right “culture add” vs. a “culture fit.”
Someone who is a culture-add brings their whole, authentic self to work to inject new energy and novel ideas into the response strategy and execution. To create these meaningful connections, employees must feel like they can express themselves and the culture creatively. Empowered, engaged employees become change-makers, which is who you want to represent your brand.
The theme of the event this year was “Moments that Matter.” How is LG creating moments that matter through social media? Lucia: As our workshop covered, witty and clever responses stop people in their tracks and increase a brand’s likeability. Moments that matter are opportunities to motivate customers to invest and reinvest in your brand by creating memorable and legendary experiences during those critical touchpoints. At LG this means providing fast response times, serving with empathy, resolving issues in channel, and creating fun, witty, and relatable content. It brings the human element into the service interaction that technology can’t replace yet.
What are some of the top challenges CX teams have to overcome to achieve legendary social care? Lucia: Building a social media customer engagement strategy that bridges the gap between marketing, e-commerce, and customer support teams is crucial. Most organizations are struggling to break down these silos to make the experience more user-friendly and efficient.
The goal is to all work together cohesively to drive customer lifetime value, but it’s easier said than done. It’s something VXI has been helping our organization work towards. For example, to design our future state, marketing, and customer service came together to define the rules of engagement, brand guidelines, and various components of our operational playbook. We’ve come a long way, but there are still areas where we recognize additional cross-functional collaboration is needed to increase brand sentiment and resolution rates. It’s an ever-evolving work in progress.
What technologies do you think will have the greatest impact on how brands connect with customers on social media over the next 2-3 years? Lucia: I think technologies like ChatGPT and GigCX platforms will continue to make it easier for brands to scale their services, optimize staffing models, and manage high-volume events like recalls. During our workshop, we demonstrated how ChatGPT can decipher customer intent, even in cases where broken English, idioms, slang, and colloquial expressions are used. From helping social media teams speed up response times to mining for business insights, there are already several use cases that I think will impact what legendary social media customer service looks like in 2-3 years.
As the pace of innovation accelerates, what role do your outsourced partnerships need to assume to add value and stay relevant? Lucia: As the competition on social media increases, partners who can help their clients mitigate risks, amplify the positive, and drive higher customer lifetime value (CLV) will always be in demand. Automation is solving for the lower-value interactions, making it more important than ever to jump in and be legendary for those make-or-break moments. Partners like VXI help us anticipate those moments and capitalize on them.
To learn more about our CX Advisory Services and how VXI helped LG on their CX journey, click here: www.vxi.com/cx-advisory
