I recently had a very good friend that likes to know what is the main shortcut to get the quickest result, it is a very interesting way of thinking and getting great feedback.

Well speaking with him the question arrived

Billie, what’s the number one shortcut for Social Customer Care?

What do you mean?

Yeah, what’s the one thing that done correctly gives you 99% of your results….

Big one! I could not choose just one, but these are my 3 best bets:

[Tweet “Empathy, Strategy and Technology: 3 shortcuts for excellent social customer service”]

1. It’s all about empathy

If you are not able to understand what the other person is feeling, you will probably fail in your customer service strategy, and this one is good for online and offline. Social customer care agents have to be able to put themselves in the client’s shoes, and have a strong desire to help them identify the problem and the cause for their frustration. Compassion and sympathy are also required.

We have to remember that when customers reach to our online channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus or Youtube to name a few) most of them have already tried other channels and are frustrated because they could not solve their problem. So you have a pretty unhappy customer who is probably frustrated, you’ll need a team who can understand him and do all they can to save the client or lose him forever.

So how do you train your social customer care team to be empathic?

An empathic interaction involves a person communicating an accurate recognition of the significance of the other person’s actions and associated emotional states. Some great ideas on how to be empathic are just posting or communicating to your team great examples on what other people of the team have achieved. Empathy can be developed and to learn by example is one of the best ways to get it fast. 

Make your social agents try your product or service. I have seen tons of people taking care of social channels and not really, really knowing the company. How can you suffer what a client is suffering if you have not even purchased an online product of your website, or flied in the airline? In order to be empathic you have gain experience on your client’s lives, period!

Master the art of radical listening. I know that online channels can make a client express himself a bit “strongly” sometimes even with irony or bad words. What is important is the ability of being really present on the unique feelings and needs the other person is experiencing. And please add to this the challenge that words are often misunderstood.

Brainstorming meetings, tons of feedback: If you don’t practice brainstorming meetings you’re missing out on so much valuable information from your company. I have encouraged these kind of meetings all my career, and it’s simple: think outside the box. If you invite members from different departments (IT, operations, marketing, communications, sales) in your organizations the value generated is huge.

Ask for feedback. Make sure you are asking your clients how they were treated on social and if there is any way they can have a better experience. That will make your team understand what your client is feeling and needing.

 

2. Develop a correct strategy, from the beginning

Please don’t wait for the day when you have to put out the fire. I’ve seen so many companies do this.

Developing an awesome social customer care strategy involves:

• Knowing your customer, what they expect and how they expect it
• Developing protocols, response models and escalation models
• Being prepared for crisis
• Knowing how to treat trolls, angry customers and influencers
• Choosing the best metrics to measure your results

There are a lot of examples of companies that have opened social customer care channels without a clear strategy, and this will only confuse your clients. And it can probably give you more than one headache in the future.

The best way is to be prepared, and obviously learn in the process

 

3. Technology is very important

Choosing the right partner is a very important part of your social customer care success or failure. there are hundreds of solutions on the market and selecting the best customer service software for your organization is challenging.

Here is a list of some of the common useful features found in the social customer service support software:

• Multi-channel management: allows your agents to receive interactions through multiple channels: phone, mail, Facebook, Twitter, other social channels, mobile app, live chat. This gives a wide range of options to your customers and generates a better customer experience.
• Unified customer view: allows you to view a full relationship map of your customers, conversations are unified and you can see a detailed history of how your customer contacted you and what was the conversation about. This enables your agents to quickly understand the customer and the history of interactions.
• Smart workflow: deliver a better customer experience creating special rules for the software to automatically route the right content to the right agent at the right time. This makes your response time much faster and delivers a WOW experience.
• Prioritize service issues from the noise: conversations are automatically prioritized using custom keywords and machine learning.
• Analytics and reporting: allows you to obtain the best data on customer service performance, with historical analysis to get accurate and actionable insights on how to improve the experience.

I hope these shortcuts make you boost your social customer care strategy to the next level. Just curious, would you add anything else?