By Walter Van Norden, Director, TELUS International 

A tremendous new opportunity has emerged for customer service with the adoption of social media by consumers and the ability for companies to effectively track conversations about their brands. The emerging area of “social care” can be defined as the efforts employees make through social media to care for customers. Big brands like Apple, Google and Dell are embracing the opportunity to provide customer support using dedicated social care channels. Analysts like Gartner predict that at least 35% of customer service centers will integrate some form of social capability by 2013.

From a company’s perspective, social care is a departure from traditional customer support via phone, email and live chat in that social conversations are public, often permanent and can easily go viral. It also represents a shift in who speaks for the corporate brand; no longer a top-down structure where only a select few speak on a company’s behalf, but instead becoming a conversation between company employees at all levels and their customers.

Benchmarking social care 

In a recently released white paper, Benchmarking Social Media Customer Service, global contact center provider, TELUS International, examined the social care strategies of seven high-tech leaders over a one week period.To be included in the analysis, social posts had to relate to customer service only.

Best practices when launching social care 

From the study, it was clear that companies are still at the early stages of developing the people, processes and technology to support social care. Even among high-tech leaders, there was no consistent approach to delivering social media customer service, but it was clear that best practices are emerging. Here are some top practices to consider:
 

1. Build a cross-functional team to launch and support social care. Start by listening to conversations to determine volume and sentiment. This will provide direction on how active you may need to be and which departments you might need support from such as marketing, sales, HR, and legal. Dell exemplifies this strategy—when its Social Media Command Center launched last year, Dell had over 5,000 employees trained in social media, with many of those listening and engaging with customers as part of their jobs.
2. Recognize which communication style is appropriate for the channel. Currently, people are writing about customer service issues and seeking written solutions. A miscommunicated post can have broad repercussions – so understand the protocol, expectations and style of the channel and how it maps onto your company’sbrand and tone before responding.
3. Create a response map that will lend some process behind how to respond to public conversations. This also reduces the risk of erratic responses and can act as an efficiency aid for agents.
4. Make sure to follow through and follow up on social conversations. Companies often get excited to establish social media channels, like Twitter, but then fail to post updated information. Even if you cannot solve a customer’s issue right away, be sure to acknowledge the problem. Knowing that an agent has made contact in a timely and professional manner can mitigate negative impact.
5. Be proactive. Social care agents should embrace the idea of proactive customer care. Reach out to customers before they become frustrated about an issue. As the benchmark study demonstrates, Best Buy is a great example of a company with empowered employees proactively solving customer issues via Twitter and Facebook – even when they are not at work!

The opportunity to enhance your brand with social care

Social care offers a clear opportunity for brands. Across the board, all brands in the study receivedhigh marks from customers. However, the sentiment scores for customer support (isolated) in social conversations were consistently lower. In fact, if done well, social care can generate more positive sentiment than overall brand sentiment (Zappos is a great example). A well-executed social care strategy can actually raise the social brand perception for the entire company.
With the need to continue to communicate with customers in their preferred channels, we’re likely to see more brands adding social care to their customer contact strategy. For now, there’s much to learn from companies that are rolling out their social care strategies today.

About the Author:
Walter Van Norden is director of marketing for TELUS International – a provider of customer care and contact center outsourcing solutions to global clients. TELUS International is the global arm of TELUS, a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, with $10.1 billion of annual revenue and 12.4 million customer connections. For more information visit: www.telusinternational.com