5 Steps To Expand The Business Value Of Social Customer Engagement

Community-based knowledge creation for customer service and sales is not that new. However, enabled by the ubiquity and ease of use of the Web and the availability of social networking tools, it has gone to a whole new level, leading to the creation of the term “social knowledge.” While more prevalent in B2C sectors, social knowledge is also starting to matter in B2B sectors.

How can companies harvest the best of social knowledge for pre-sales and after-sales customer service they offer through their own contact centers? How should they engage with customers on social websites? The following five-step plan will help increase the odds of success in harvesting social knowledge for customer service and sales.

1. Assess the opportunity

Companies need to first assess the opportunity for social knowledge harvesting in the context of the nature of their business (e.g. B2B, B2C etc.) and the customer queries they get (simple vs. complex).

Social knowledge creation has been more common in B2C sectors because it is easier to attain “critical mass” with more contributors and less specialized knowledge. This means a bigger harvesting opportunity in B2C than in B2B.

Customer inquiries fall broadly into four categories—informational, transactional, diagnostic, and purchase advice. Generally, informational and transactional queries tend to be of low-to-moderate complexity while diagnostic and advice-seeking queries are of moderate-to-high complexity. Informational and transactional queries, therefore, are more likely to be resolved by social knowledge, although social knowledge (e.g. product review sites) has become an important influencer, especially in B2C commerce.

2. Identify high-value knowledge

Social knowledge contributors have varying levels of reputation, prolificacy, and influence, which most social networking tools measure (number of posts, acceptance rate, number of connections, etc.). The Social Knowledge Value™ (SKV) of contributors can be estimated by using a combination of these metrics. Knowledge from high-SKV contributors is ideal for “deep dive” harvesting, while that from low-SKV contributors can be ignored or skimmed.

3. Engage current customers

Customers are key to the initiative – as knowledge contributors, posters of queries and brand advocates on social sites. Businesses need to make sure that queries posted on social sites are resolved in a timely manner, especially if they are from high lifetime financial value customers, whom you usually provide “platinum service” (e.g. proactive offer to chat, rapid service levels, etc.). The risk of non-resolution of customer queries is high on social sites because of broad market exposure.

If high-financial-value customers are also high-SKV contributors, they not only present an opportunity for deep-dive knowledge harvesting but are also important for collaborative product development and social brand building. See Figure 2 for a framework for knowledge harvesting as part of customer service strategy.

4. Harvest and unify

Contact centers need to make sure that social knowledge goes through the same robust quality control processes as internally-generated knowledge, so that it can be made part of a trusted multichannel knowledge base. Likewise, social customer interactions should be added to other multichannel interactions as part of a unified customer interaction hub, which consolidates interactions, knowledge, business rules, analytics, and administration in one place for better customer experience, service consistency, context continuity, and process efficiencies. The hub approach allows agents to view customers’ social interactions, in addition to traditional one-to-one interactions with the business, for full context and rapid resolution.

5. Account for sector-specific and legal factors

Social monitoring tools, social knowledge, and robust customer service compliance workflows can help businesses in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products to track adverse incident reports and act on them rapidly in compliance with regulations.

All businesses should make sure they are not violating copyright laws while harvesting content from social websites.

When this step-by-step approach is implemented, social knowledge is bound to add significant value to any enterprise in the form of improved customer loyalty, enhanced brand equity, expanded knowledge ROI, and reduced customer service costs.

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