Digital Storytellers Customer Experience Playbook
Today, social media is about more than marketing
Social media is evolving to impact many elements of the customer experience, and 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Marketing, sales, and service can all deliver more meaningful customer moments and engagement when they’re working from a single social platform.
BUILD A FOUNDATION
Building stronger customer relationships today requires rich insights that can only be found on social media. Great customer experiences on social media start when you connect social technology behind the scenes. Combining customers’ social media history with data from other channels can give your teams a complete view of customers they can use to deliver more relevant engagement.
Business Problem
Today’s top challenge for marketers in all industries is engaging with customers in real time, and social media is the key space for this type of engagement. Many companies keep social data in silos across various departments. This invariably leads to disconnected customer experiences across marketing, sales, and service, as each team operates without a full understanding of customers’ social media interactions with the company.
Solution
It’s crucial to connect social data with data from other channels to garner a complete view of your customer interactions. This way, you’ll see more than just a customer’s social history: You’ll connect the dots to understand who they are as a person and what they want from your brand. When you unify insights from various channels through a single social media management technology platform, all of the departments and teams at your company will have the same access to rich information that can strengthen their customer-facing efforts.
Beginner
To get started, you first need to set up a framework for social media governance and compliance, including approvals and audits. This framework needs support from your technology. Then, make sure your teams understand how your business priorities should inspire the themes of the content you publish on social media. Establish the tone and voice for your content strategy, and start publishing based on a digital content calendar. Finally, establish frameworks for your social marketing initiatives for each of your teams, brands, and geographic markets. It’s essential to easily share successful social content among all of these.
Intermediate
With your social strategy up and running, it’s time to start using social listening dashboards to gather deeper insights about what your audiences are interested in and what their concerns might be during a crisis. Make sure you can set up new service cases with a simple click, and keep all your service teams working on the same data platform. Set up a labeling taxonomy for your social posts and authors for easy reporting and automation later on. For example, you can view sentiment by post label or view persona insight dashboards for author labels. Then, use social listening to monitor posts mentioning your company, and identify where you’d be welcome to join the conversation. Use your best judgment as you manage your communities, and create a chart with rules to consult when you’re not sure whether you should engage.
Advanced
At an advanced level, you need to understand how your social media marketing contributes to the overall success of entire campaigns. Analyze your data to gather campaign-level insights, and find out whether there’s content performing well on other channels that you could use on social media. Also, be sure to monitor and respond to Google reviews, and route those reviews to local managers for the most authentic responses. Set up automatic web analytics tagging for all ongoing posts to ensure that community managers don’t need to do any coding to ensure posts are tagged correctly. Proper post tagging also helps you prove the value of social media through web analytics. Finally, set up audience tracking tags for outgoing posts. Use tools like Audience Studio to retarget individuals who click through to your website from a social post, so you can convert unknown users to known users.
MAKE SERVICE MORE SOCIAL
On social media, your customers expect convenient replies to their service requests. With a unified view of customer engagement history across all your channels, you can make it easy for reps to proactively solve social media service cases, offer relevant and personalized content, and turn potentially negative customer experiences into profoundly positive ones.
Business Problem
When it comes to customer service, social media is the channel of choice for many customers. Sixty-six percent of service professionals are witnessing increased case volume through non-traditional channels, and social media is the top non-traditional channel. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t offer social media service experiences as robust as what they offer by phone. This is typically due to a lack of companywide data unity. Social customer service teams may only see a customer’s social history, not their entire customer record. This often leads to incomplete and unsatisfying service experiences.
Solution
Imagine a customer who posts on social media about needing an incorrect delivery address fixed. A service rep with a complete view of the customer can make corrections on all of the customer’s packages, while a service rep who can only see social history will make the correction for only one package. For full visibility, service and marketing teams need to work from the same social data platform, without silos. Fortunately, these are usually the easiest data silos to break down.
Beginner
To start out, you’ll want to consider technology that enables you to do social marketing at scale. You’ll also want to think about giving your customers outstanding social service experiences. Remember, automation can help you easily scale up and down to intelligently prioritize service inquiries. Be sure to use social listening to surprise and delight customers with proactive customer service. With a single view of customer activity across every channel (not just social) you can make sure your customers are satisfied. A truly great social media service strategy brings together sales, marketing, and service teams. When these teams work with shared data that creates a unified view of each customer, they can actively improve customer experiences.
Intermediate
Think about what your customers want, and what they use social media for. Customers use different service channels for different situations. Be sure to give them a consistently positive experience, no matter which channel they use. Make it easy for customers to arrive at service resolutions through social media; they shouldn’t have to call you in the event of social communications becoming “too difficult.” However, it’s also important to let customers know they can easily switch service channels if they want to. Across all your service channels, be sure to have secure identity-verification methods available. Most importantly, ensure that your service team is working from the same social data platform as your marketing team. Service and marketing should work together to learn how they can influence mutual success. Remember, great service experiences can lead to great marketing experiences, and vice versa.
Advanced
Ready for some more advanced social service tactics? Start by rewarding advocacy: Identify your biggest fans and feature them in your customer community. You can also create service cases based on opportunities to jump into industry conversations on social media and automatically route each case to the most appropriate person at your company. Next best offers can be an important part of social service strategy; nothing says “we care about you” more than a personalized recommendation added within a service interaction. You can even use artificial intelligence to choose the next best offer for each customer. Keep in mind that sometimes the best marketing is no marketing, and suppress ads aimed at customers who currently have open service cases. Finally, use social listening to identify the right time to join the conversation when customers are complaining about a competitor’s products. This can be tricky to pull off, but when done right it’s often a great opportunity to create a proactive service case.
LISTEN, LEARN, AND REPORT
Your customers are talking about you on social media. Listening to their conversations is key to shaping your social media strategy and creating relevant engagement in the future. Be strategic about your social listening efforts and you’ll be rewarded with satisfied stakeholders and customers alike.
Business Problem
Social listening doesn’t just provide insights for your social marketing team. By listening closely to discussions about your brand, you can gather insights that can help improve the performance of every department in your organization. To use social listening to its fullest potential, you need to set up the basics and have a strategic framework in place.
Solution
With a strategic reporting framework, you can make sure that all departments are ready to react quickly to events, like crises, that break on social media, and consistently deliver impactful insights to your stakeholders. If you’re not creating service cases from social listening, you’re missing out on powerful opportunities to assist your customers in their moments of need.
Beginner
Set up dashboards for your social accounts and social listening, and use these as the basis for a weekly wrap-up with your stakeholders. Be sure to keep social listening available on your phone, so you can check in wherever you go. If you’re managing a real-world marketing activation event or quickly need to view insights on the go, this is a must-have. Train up your sales teams in this functionality, too, so they can keep an eye on what’s happening with their accounts and potentially identify sales opportunities. It’s also important to have a crisis reporting framework ready for each type of social crisis you need to prepare for. For each crisis scenario, your stakeholders will be looking for different types of metrics and insights, so be sure you’re ready to support them.
Intermediate
Create a command center for social listening insights, and make it available to everyone in your organization. This gives all employees a clear understanding of what customers are saying in the real world. It can be a source of best practices for dealing with a crisis, and a great way to measure your company’s digital transformation efforts. Be sure to build a monthly report of all your social listening insights, and start exploring the different functions of your social analytics platform for measuring those insights. As you experiment, you’ll find a selection of methods that consistently provide the best insights for you. For example, you may find it particularly useful to analyze peaks in social conversation or to understand the top words signaling positive or negative sentiment for your brand. Establish a framework for adding labels to your customers. Then, you can analyze your personas by label and produce insights for key audience groups. If you find you’ve been producing too many reports, you can set up notifications instead to keep stakeholders updated in real time.
Advanced
You can uncover additional insights by tracking images, including logos, objects, and scenery, through social listening. Artificial intelligence can tell you which images are associated with your brand in your social media feeds and what they mean. It’s also helpful to listen to social media discussions about your competitors. Track which topics are driving negative sentiment for those brands, and identify opportunities to turn those negatives into positives for your brand through social publishing. Use your post and author labeling taxonomy to analyze social listening with labels as a filter. Be sure to consider how you can automate the process of labeling. Third-party insight providers can also help you segment social data in new and interesting ways. Consider linking your social service platform to your social marketing platform, so you can collect insights from everyone who has opened a service case. This may help you identify the root causes of some issues. Then, you can take preventative measures to stop service cases before they happen.
EMPOWER SALES TEAMS
Social media can be a salesperson’s best friend. Listening to what prospects are saying on social media can help sales reps identify opportunities to help customers and solve real business challenges. Insights from social media on all topics relevant to your business can be incredibly helpful for sales reps. Social media is where they’ll find honest and real customer perspectives that can’t be found anywhere else.
Business Problem
Keeping sales reps as productive as possible can be a challenge for any organization. Right now, sales reps say they spend too much time managing emails and logging activities, and not enough time researching customers’ needs.* To take action on opportunities, sales reps need the right intelligence and information delivered quickly and seamlessly. These insights can be found on social media, but without the right technology, it’s a struggle to find and use them efficiently. * Salesforce “State of Sales 3rd,” Edition
Solution
Automated social media scanning and filtering tools can help reps find relevant and trending social intelligence. Once reps find intelligence worth acting upon, they can instantly act on leads, add social contacts to accounts, and create new tasks with just a few clicks, all from within the same digital toolset. They can even connect your company’s social accounts, reshare customer posts, and easily save posts for further discussion among your teams.
Beginner
Set up social listening dashboards in your CRM for your sales reps, so they can get quick insight through all your social accounts. Give them the ability to check social listening insights by searching keywords on their phones, so they can research on the go.
Intermediate
Filter social listening topics based on your business objectives. For example, if your reps are likely to surface more sales opportunities during social discussions of financial restructuring, they can home in on that topic. Make sure that your marketing community managers can create leads in your CRM using a social data platform shared with the sales team.
Advanced
Make it easy for sales reps to take action on opportunities they find on social media, and send these actions through your CRM. For example, let reps add social contacts to account records, or share social posts they find with their teams. Add automated lead scoring to your social listening efforts to rank and score leads based on their social signals and language in their posts, and route those new leads through your CRM.
USE AUTOMATION AND AI
No matter what the conversation is, your social media teams are always listening and engaging. Empower all your teams to do even more for your business, customers, and social audience by integrating automation and AI into social media service and analysis.
Business Problem
Your social media, marketing, sales, and service teams have a finite capacity. There’s only so much they can do. On the other hand, social media volume can rise and fall unpredictably at a near infinite rate. Tasked with keeping constantly up to date with social feeds, community managers often report burnout as a top challenge. How can your teams be expected to keep tabs on it all, filter through the noise, and focus on the posts that matter, without burning out from overload?
Solution
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can help your teams bridge the social media productivity gap. By filtering posts for relevant content and providing prompts for real-time user engagement, automation and AI are your teams’ best bet for efficiently managing social media at any volume level without fear of burnout. They’re the secret to focusing on what matters.
Beginner
First, set up automation rules to sort posts. Prioritize important ones and route them to the right team members. This might include sending posts from VIP customers to your VIP team, sharing posts in certain languages with key agents, or identifying posts as service cases and routing them directly to your service team. Be sure to take steps to reduce noise generated by posts you don’t need to attend to. For example, when a post gets popular, groups of friends will sometimes tag each other on it, over and over. You don’t need to get involved in those comments, so set up automated rules to automatically ignore or delete them.
Intermediate
Think strategically about the phrases people use on social media that lead to service cases. This may include known error codes in your app or references to late delivery alongside mentions of your brand. Through social listening and automation, proactively create services to help these customers. You can also use social listening to keep tabs on sales leads. Their language may indicate how close they are to making a purchase. For example, broadly asking for hotel recommendations indicates that someone is still near the start of their hotel booking journey. Asking for friends’ feedback on a specific hotel suggests they’re getting closer to making a reservation. If you don’t want to immediately create new sales leads, you can also use these signals to automatically add people to a social advertising audience.
Advanced
Get creative. There are many different social signals that you can take action on, and add value to the social customer experience. These actions may not just be marketing and reporting actions: They may take place in your customer service experience or sales CRM. Workshop and whiteboard your customer journeys, try segmenting by buyer persona types, and see where you have the opportunity to create new solutions.
