importance of Customer service

According to a survey poor customer service is eroding consumer loyalty and confidence in retail brands. 

• 30% of UK consumers have become less loyal to retail brands in the past five years.
• One-quarter of those customers identified poor service as the main reason for this decreased loyalty.
• Almost half of respondents (48%) said they had to repeat information during their last communication with a retailer.
• All age groups identified repetition as a problem; however, it occurs most frequently for customers under the age of 35—with one in 20 repeating themselves at least five times.
• Only 30% of these younger customers had their issue resolved after one interaction.
• By contrast, 64% of customers over the age of 65 did not have to repeat their complaint at all, feeling satisfied after first contact.
• Of those who feel less loyal to retail brands, 37% of 18 to 24 year olds cite service as the key factor versus just 20% of those aged 65 and older.

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Retention vs. Acquisition - and the Winner Is…

Marketers need to decide which is more important to them - acquiring new leads and potential customers, or retaining and nurturing the current customer base

"To be or not to be?" asks Shakespeare's Hamlet.

For years digital marketers faced the same conundrum: "to buy or not to buy?" in reference to purchasing leads and prospects...also known as spamming (although hopefully you're in the "not to buy" camp).

Knowing how to spend your marketing budget with confidence is always a challenge. Where do I allocate the money so it makes most impact? How do I allocate the money in a way that I can show tangible results? These are the typical questions marketers ask themselves.

Of all the questions, the most critical to answer is do we invest good money in acquiring new customers, or do we focus on retaining the customers we have already acquired and personalize their experience? "To retain or acquire?" - this is the question.

And before I let you know the answer, let's look at what marketers are currently doing.

According to a survey by Econsultancy, 34 percent of the participants indicated that they will increase their investment in acquisition, while only 18 percent will focus on retention. If we look at content marketing strategies, one of the main goals is acquisition (71 percent of responders), and Forrester concurs: "Marketers obsess over acquisition. Even as the lines between marketing and customer experience blur, our survey respondents prioritize customer acquisition efforts over nurturing and deepening relationships with their most valuable and loyal customers."

Looking at what the others (not "the others" from Lost!) are doing, it is very clear that marketing budgets are over-focused on acquisition rather than retention.

If you're a regular reader of my columns, you'd be expecting me to start talking about increasing allocation of budgets to retention. And you would be right, this is exactly what I am going to do...

Here is an example to start illustrating my thinking:

Joe is an online shoe retailer who became really successful with his business. He uses Google and Facebook to advertise the branded shoes he has on offer. In a hyper-competitive branded-shoe industry, the customers are only looking at the prices they can easily compare with a simple search. So Joe needs to invest a lot of money to generate sales. Ninety-eight percent of his business is first-time buyers. With only 2 percent repeat buyers, his product costs are most likely to look like this:

Acquisition: $20.00

G&A: $10.00

Shipping: $5.00

Product cost: $50.00

Profit margin: $15.00

Total: $100.00

With higher advertising costs and lower loyalty, he is seeing his acquisition costs spiking. With this example, and provided that advertising costs remains the same, he will need to sell 6,600 pairs of shoes for a profit of $100,000.

To prove my point, let's assume that 98 percent of his business will be focused on selling to clients he already acquired: He's profit margin grows to $35, as he is dropping his acquisition costs. In order to reach to a $100,000 profit he will now need to sell only 2,800 pairs of shoes (i.e. 58 percent less). This in turn will probably further help to decrease the G&A costs, and Joe will be able to pass on some of these savings to his customers.

Continuing with this train of thought, it becomes clear that if you focus your efforts mostly on acquisition, you're actually working for your competitor who provides their client with a more individual customer experience, and making sure that their customers stay loyal.

And the Winner Is...Retention!

If your start-up days are behind you and your business is established, chances are that growing your business will be cheaper and faster if you retain and sell to your existing client base. This is not to suggest that you need to abandon acquisition efforts completely, but you need to shift the focus to your existing clients.

If you are a start-up, then naturally your initial objectives should be to focus on new business acquisition and then as the customer base increases, start shifting the focus to retention.

But before I finish, a quick word of caution regarding ERFM: If you intend to use ERFM analysis on your database, be careful if you are focusing too heavily on acquisitions. You will find that most customers will be skewed to the right hand side of the lifecycle (inactive or churning clients) with much fewer customers in the center (loyal) and in the initial stages (first-time buyers).

Until next time, stay tuned.

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How to Turn that Customer into an Evangelist

New customers have a tendency to evolve through three phases once they decide to buy from you.

Initially they feel very excited about their decision, before going through a learning curve where they may struggle with blending in your products/services.

Finally, they begin to experience the value that you provide and the relationship settles down and finds its own balance.

Phase 2 can be a potentially vulnerable time for a sales person, because without the benefit of an established track record, and in the face of possible problems – no matter how minor, this is the time when most newly acquired customers are apt to change their mind.

How to Bring Great Customer Service Online

Having great online customer service is crucial in this day and age. Having great offline customer service is simply not enough to effectively own your customer relationship management.

How do you bring this excellent customer service you may have offline on to your online presence? Here are some tips to get you started:

1) A quick response rate:

If your customers are asking a question or asking for support, they expect you to respond, and in a reasonable time. To build a great relationship online with your customers, it simply starts with this.

Make sure to have someone monitoring your platforms at least throughout regular business hours, and if you are a larger company, make sure you tell your customers when you’re signing off for the night. This way they know when to expect service.

2) Show them that you care:

This is one of the most important aspects to customer service in general, even online! All customers want to know is that you care about them and care about what they have to say.

Listen to them, and provide the support and help that you can, and respond to them even when they aren’t complaining or seeking help. Interacting with your community goes a long way.

3) Help where people are asking:

When someone reaches out to you on Twitter, they don’t want to have to go email you or phone you. They expect to receive help and support right on Twitter. Obviously sometimes this is hard to do because of the 140 character constraints of Twitter, but try your best to do this as often as possible.

The beautiful thing about social media is that it allows for easy and quick service. Customers expect this, and if they wanted service via the phone, they would have called you first!

4) Separate your support feed:

This will not apply for everyone. It is great to have your support right on your Twitter page, but some companies that deal with a lot of support, may want to consider splitting up their support feed with their regular feed.

There’s nothing more annoying then visiting a Twitter page and the entire feed being filled with support responses. If you are a company that frequently uses your social feeds for support, consider having two. For example: Hootsuite has their regular Twitter and then Hootsuite Help.

5) Seek out conversations:

Sometimes people are talking about you and just not directly tagging you. Search for the conversations happening surrounding your brand or product line, and join in on the conversation, as you feel appropriate. Also, seek out people that may be spelling your brand, or products incorrectly. Often, people may make mistakes when tagging you or talking about you. Always be seeking out these people as well, because you don’t want their queries to go unnoticed.

These are just some of many useful tips to get you started with developing a great customer service online via your social media platforms. Start thinking about what makes your offline customer service so great, and try and implement that online. This way you’re covering customer service from all levels.

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Creating a single view of stock: five key considerations

Adopting a single view of your stock across retail channels is an essential precursor to a true multichannel strategy.

Alongside a single view of the customer, it is a fundamental foundation in integrating online and offline operations.

Even as a standalone project, a single view of stock can be highly beneficial. Understanding your stock in real-time across your retail channels can enable utilisation of innovative fulfilment models: click and collect, multichannel returns, as well as new and valuable customer service and merchandising solutions.

Whilst understanding your stock may sound simple, it can be quite the opposite.

This is particularly relevant in environments where offline and online retail functions have developed as essentially independent businesses, as is the case for many clicks-and-mortar retailers.

In these scenarios, store distribution warehouses might operate entirely separately from online fulfilment, with in-store stock tracked separately from its online equivalent and even online and offline returns accounted for differently.

Google Wants The Best User Experience for Mobile Users

Google recently made a move to improve the user experience of mobile search users. Its a move that we have expected from a Digital Marketing view point since last year – we simply didn’t know how the move would be made. So the move means that if your website has a redirect for users and it does not go to the equivelant page of a mobile version (or your site is not responsive) you will see a similar message in search as to the one below.

If you are reading this, it’s likely you are a website owner or SEO with this issue. So what is the solution?

Interigate The Issue

First we need to check that the message you are seeing is “smartphone” related and not some other issue. So nip into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, you should have a message if you are seeing these in search results. If not you can still check go to Crawl > Crawl Errors > Smartphone – if you see anything in “faulty redirect” these are the urls you will need to address with the solutions below.

Fixing The Issue

There are a few ways to fix issues with the redirect message from Google. Here are the top 3 we would advise:

1. Don’t simply redirect all “smart device” users to the homepage or category pages on a mobile site. Try to ensure a one-for-one experience between the two versions of your website. This isn’t always practical though so where this is the case limit the number of “wholesale” redirects you have.
2. Where you can’t redirect users to a similar page on a mobile version of the site, it is advised that you simply “do nothing” and do not redirect them from a desktop site.
3. Try updating the design of your website to use responsive web design, this would mean that a single version of your site would serve both mobile devices and desktop devices gracefully.

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What's the Hub of Your Online Presence?

With all of the talk about social media, it’s important not to ignore the key role a website plays in building your business.

Social media, done well, can help send more traffic to your website. And that’s the point ... to get visitors to your website. But, will what they see and experience when they arrive at your site support or undermine your business?

Social Media Needs to be Part of an Overall Strategy, Not the Hub

Social media needs to be part of an overall sales and marketing strategy that includes your website, not something that is isolated from everything else you do to promote your business. It isn’t a one hit wonder that will magically drive people to your business. It requires an investment of time and energy, planning and thought, strategic activities and follow-up.

And the result of your hard work, assuming you’re delivering on what you are selling to begin with, can help build brand name recognition and a solid reputation for your business, and send traffic to your website!

But, if you look great on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and/or LinkedIn but have neglected your website, your business will suffer for it!

Your website, not social media, should be the hub of your online presence. It's the only network you actually control!

The Hub of Your Business Online

Most people today go online to find, or to find out about, a business and their products and/or services. This may be because they've seen your name somewhere; because a friend or family member mentioned your name; or because your business appeared in a search result. And, what they find will determine whether or not they stay on your website and dig deeper, or whether they leave (bounce off) right away.

If they discover you on a social network, chances are, if they’re thinking of doing business with you, the next step for them will be your website, to find out a bit more about you. And, with so many people using their smart phones to check things out online, they may decide to do this on their mobile device.

Thus the importance of having a website that looks good on devices of all sizes, and why 'responsive' websites have become a 'must have'.

The impression visitors have, conscious or not, when they arrive on your website will make a big difference in their decision to call you and give you a chance to earn their business, or not. It is much more than having just an attractive website, although this is good. But, if you hope to have visitors return again from time to time, make it a place they'll think of as a helpful resource and not simply a place they'll drop by once, but never again.

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Negative Social Media Marketing Feedback and How to Handle It

According to eMarketer, of businesses in the United States with a minimum of 100 employees, 87 percent utilized social media marketing within the last year. While that is certainly a large number, clearly not all businesses are taking advantage of the benefits offered by social media marketing. Many businesses that are not putting social media marketing to work for them may be holding back because they do not want negative feedback or comments. Unfortunately, just because a business does not utilize social media does not mean consumers are remaining silent. With sites such as Yelp, it is incredibly easy for consumers to discuss and review your brand, even if you are not using social media marketing on your own.

Since you cannot avoid the potential for negative feedback, it is imperative that you understand how to respond to it. The social media training firm Social Media Marketing University found that less than 50 percent of marketing professionals had developed an effective plan for handling negative social media feedback. 

Respond Rather than Ignore

The first and most important rule of handling negative feedback on social media is to acknowledge and respond. Ignoring negative feedback does not make it go away. The worst action that you can take, other than to simply ignore it, is to delete it. You should only delete negative feedback in certain circumstances, such as when it involves lewd comments or inappropriate language. As tempting as it can be to handle negative feedback by deleting it, the truth of the matter is that it is already out there, and you can be certain that someone has seen it. Furthermore, the person who originally wrote the comment will see that it has been deleted, and nothing will prevent him or her from posting another, even more irate comment. Any chance that you have of rectifying the situation and preventing it from becoming exacerbated is gone forever.

What exactly is on the line by taking the time to respond to negative feedback? A study conducted by The Retail Consumer Report found that 68 percent of consumers who posted negative feedback received a response from the relevant business. Of that number, 18 percent of consumers who posted negative feedback were converted into loyal customers and 33 percent eventually posted positive feedback. Furthermore, 34 percent of consumers who had originally posted negative feedback later deleted that feedback following a response.

Clearly, when handled properly, even negative feedback can actually prove to be a beneficial tool for deriving loyalty from your customers.

Respond Quickly 

While responding to negative feedback is important, simply responding is not enough. The timeframe in which you respond is also critical to the final outcome. One study found that 25 percent of customers posting a negative review anticipate a response within 1 hour. Even more startling, 6 percent of consumers expect to receive a response within 10 minutes.

Provide Additional Information

So, what do you say when responding to a negative review or comment on social media? Above all, it is important to be sincere and human. Do not make the mistake of simply following a set protocol for every negative comment or review that you receive. A response of “We’re sorry to hear about your experience,” provides customers with no helpful information and does not resolve the problem. Responding quickly is important, but only if you provide genuine, helpful information. Be willing to be honest in your response. Rather than attempt to provide excuses for the customer’s experience, own up to it if the customer’s bad experience was your fault. Offer a genuine apology and provide a solution.

Know What Is Being Said About Your Company

The only way that you can appropriately respond to negative feedback on social media is if you actually know what is being said about your company. Even if your business is not a Fortune 500 company with the budget to hire a dedicated social media manager, you still need to know what is being said about your business. Setting up alerts through Google and even typing the name of your business into a Google search from time to time can help you to stay on top of the comments that are out there. 

Don’t Take It Personally

Finally, as hard as it may be, try to avoid taking negative feedback personally. Try to view such negative feedback as constructive criticism and an opportunity to improve your operations. If you feel that the customer is wrong, do not hesitate to defend your business, but make sure that you do it in a polite way. In some instances, the truth of the matter may fall somewhere in the middle. When this is the case, it is important to apologize for any error that is on your part while also gently correcting any misinformation on the part of the customer. At this point, it is also usually best to take the conversation offline and continue it with the customer in private. 

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SEO, Social & Email: 10 Best Practices

SEO, social media and email are three of the most important online tactics in digital marketing.

Follow these 10 best practices for guaranteed success.

The following best practices cover proven tactics in SEO, social media and email marketing. These expert tips are a great place to start when evaluating the maturity of your organisation’s digital marketing strategy.

Know your audience

The most important factor of digital marketing is to know your audience inside and out. You should create a number of target personas for your brand.

A digitally mature company will know which segments of their audience are more likely to convert than others. They will be measuring not only community sizes, but overall reach,  engagement and how many conversions your social media activity delivers. The target personas will be much more detailed, and there could be up to four or five different templates. Hubspot offers some great advice on how to research and create your detailed buyer personas. A digitally mature company will know exactly what tactics will ensure a community members converts into a website visitor and eventually a customer.

Brilliant Content

Brilliant content is still one of the most important factors to successful SEO. Google analyses over 200 ranking factors to determine your SEO score, and the quality of your content accounts for a high number of them. Some of the factors include content length, grammar and spelling, keywords, originality and layout.  

A digitally mature company will be producing original content aimed at establishing themselves as thought leaders. Big data, a different angle, or research gathered through surveys are all good techniques to use to display a deeper level of insight. A digitally mature company will have tailored their content around their audience personas.

Authority

No one knows exactly how search engines calculate authority, and there are most probably multiple factors. The type of links your site receives (lots of quality or ‘neighbourhood’ links?) or social references (from respected accounts?) and engagement metrics (long clicks?) may all play a role in site authority, according to Search Engine Land. Best practice suggests any outgoing press, articles and guest blog posts link back to your site. Buying links from dodgy sites will get you nowhere.

Do not overuse keywords

Search engine spiders can detect the overuse of keywords on your pages, so anything written unnaturally or with too many keywords will only harm you. Try to keep it natural and logical. If you are looking for keywords to use, Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner tool can help you come up with more.

Optimised landing pages

A site that is difficult to use or hard to navigate can hurt ranking by reducing time on site, pages viewed and bounce rate. Make it easy for your user to get around, and give prominence to where you want them to click. Too many ads and making it too difficult for people to find content are two common mistakes people make, that only increase bounce rates.

If you know your bounce rate it will help determine other information about your site. For example, if your bounce rate is 80% or higher and you have content on your website, chances are something is wrong, according to Search Engine Watch.

In 2014, a mobile-friendly site will be fundamental to a successful mobile SEO strategy. According to the BrightEdge MobileShare Report, smartphone traffic increased 125% as compared to desktop growth, which increased only 12%.

Shareable

There is no point having great content if no one knows about it. Remember the goal is to make your content useful enough that people talk about it and link to it. This won't happen if people aren't sharing it so you have to get the word out.

Social networks and forums are the best places to do this. Make sure you are sharing helpful, interesting and engaging content. Also share other people’s content through your social media channels so you are not just talking about yourself. Be active and encourage discussion around topics relating to your industry and those that your target audience will be interested by. Make sure you have easy sharing buttons on your site and you get your staff regularly sharing your own content to their social media channels.

Socially Stacked produced a helpful infographic detailing a few dozen commonly used buzzwords and popular phrases to use in your social and blog content which will boost the likelihood of sharing.

Establish a personality

Establish a tone of voice for your social media channels, as it will help you to differentiate your business from the masses. It doesn’t have to be radical or game changing, but something which your target audience will appeal to and that you feel is most relevant for your brand.

Becca Fieler from Bizactions.com writes, “Many professional services providers, such as CPA firms, financial institutions, law firms, and payroll service bureaus, believe that personality diminishes the respectability of their organisations.”

“The trick is to integrate a unique, yet professional, personality into your marketing to generate more opportunities without losing credibility.” Use this tone of voice across your social media, emails and in your blogs in order to be consistent and memorable.

Visually Engaging

Include lots of images to make your content more visually appealing and help the reader digest the information. Original images work very well in social media as they give a live and behind the scenes feel. They are much more likely to be shared too.

Posts with photos are far more likely to be shared in social media. Photo posts get 120% more engagement on Facebook, according to Wishpond. Try to avoid stock photography as it can be a bit dull. Embedding videos is great as it will break the post up and appeal to a wider group of visitors.

Personalised Emails

While social media still enjoys some of its new-kid-on-the-block novelty, email still reigns as the preferred marketing method for 75% of users, according to research compiled by Web hosting service Host Papa.

Email offers numerous advantages when it comes to delivering information directly to users — it reaches a captive audience who has opened it to hear from you, and prompts action from recipients.

Marketers should take advantage of the opportunity presented by email to share information that is relevant to recipients who are familiar with the brand, who already associate with it in some way, and who expect timely updates from their preferred products and services.

According to the Aberdeen Group, personalised emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. A digitally mature company will of course be utilising this, by creating one-to-one email communications and segmenting their audiences based on criteria like industry or product interest.

Analytics

Measuring all your activity is absolutely key in digital marketing, as we all strive to prove ROI. Google Analytics offers some in depth analytics for free, but it is recommended that an expert analyses and feeds back the data.

Everything you do should be measured; from the amount of tweets you send, to the email open rates, to which keywords perform better for your SEO. This is where you will be able to test out every technique and work out what is best for your company.

A digitally mature company will be using Google Analytics’ Goals to go deeper into your website visitor behaviour and determine whether or not your visitors are acting the way you intend them to. Goals can even put your mind at ease by tracking the completion of tasks on your website, such as downloading brochures and submitting email addresses.

A digitally mature company will be taking those extra steps to ensure that their SEO, social media and email solutions are up to speed for the coming year. Those that don’t get more advanced with their marketing techniques will begin to see results suffer.

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Are Your Social Media Landing Pages Ready for Prime Time?

For businesses these days, maintaining a Twitter and Facebook account is as important as having a telephone number. In many cases, more so. Customer engagement on social media is at an all-time high and shows no signs of slowing down. Consumers have come to expect their customer experience to extend to their favorite social channels and if you’re not there to meet them, your competitors will be happy to step up to the plate.

Excellent content is vital to a strong social presence so don’t overlook Twitter and Facebook landing pages in the rush to post your next viral update. If your social media accounts are your customers’ hospitable gathering spot, those landing pages are your welcome mat. Here are some great ways to polish them up:

• Know your image sizes. Both Facebook and Twitter have specific guidelines for each image area on your account’s homepage so be sure to review them and adjust your pictures accordingly. Don’t try to squeeze something down to fit a tiny box or enlarge a picture beyond recognition so it’s just “good enough.” Use a free image editor to get just the right look and size. We like Skitch for Mac and Picasa for Windows, or you can check out PicMonkey for an online option.

• Clear the clutter. It’s tempting to include as much information as you can about everything your company has to offer, but this is definitely a case where less is more. Include only the images and static content that supports your company’s mission statement and goals. Save lower priority messages for other parts of your marketing campaigns.

• Be cool. Or warm. You want your content to shine, not get lost in a busy background or a jumble of color. Pick a color scheme that doesn’t overwhelm customers but that’s also in keeping with your overall message. Warmer colors are perfect for the down-home look that’s ideal for a dog groomer, while a security firm may want to go with cooler colors that play up the seriousness of its services.

• Include a call to action. More than likely your visitors came to your landing page looking for product or contact information. Of course you’ll include those important things on your page, but don’t forget to tell customers what to do with the info once they have it. A clear call to action belongs on every landing page, every time. In fact, it’s often a good idea to use that as a starting point when creating your page and then build everything else around it.

Social media bio and homepages can be tricky to get right, but it’s very important that your welcome mat gets people through your front door so they stick around to become lifelong customers. Don’t feel you need to tackle the project yourself and don’t be afraid to call in a professional to help you put your best foot forward.

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What Startups Can Learn From Established Brands on Social Media

Established brands have the opportunity to set some great examples for the startup community, especially when it comes to successfully navigating the social media waters. By monitoring how the larger companies are effectively marketing on social, young businesses can learn how to successfully take on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and reach the type of audience best suited for their own brand. Identifying with an established company in your startup’s industry is a perfect way to absorb their expertise and social know-how, creating value for newer companies that may not know where to start.

Here are a few ways startups can emulate the success larger brands are having on social:

1. Steadily Scale Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

New businesses are eager to find the right tools for developing a successful marketing strategy. Fortunately, social media provides the opportunity to market broadly with minimal cost – but there are many different networks to choose from.

Take a look at how the established brands within your startup’s industry are growing on social and try to set that pace for your business. Too much, too soon can spam the social scene with unimportant posts, or result in sudden lack of content. Quality is more important than quantity, so identify which platform is best to start with and grow from there at a pace that is comfortable for your own business.

2. Recognize (and Use!) Social Media as a Powerful Customer Service Tool

Providing customer service is an impactful way for startups to utilize social media. Customers expect instant replies, and monitoring and responding through your social accounts is a great way to meet that demand and help turn customers into brand advocates.

Larger brands do well with this, as they usually form teams responsible for responding to social inquiries. Just because your startup is smaller, it doesn’t mean you can’t have this type of dedicated team or team member ready and waiting to reply. However, since two-way conversations on social networks are critical customer service gateways, whoever is charged with responding must remain committed to the task.

3. Select the Right Social Media Platform(s) for Your Business

Every industry has specific social platforms that work best to reach desired customers. For example, visual social networks like Instagram and Pinterest are particularly effective for the fashion industry, whereas the technology community often gravitates toward Twitter for brand-building.

Established brands already have a clear overview of which platforms are most effective in getting their content and message across. Look to others (even fellow startups) in your industry and identify which platforms are most relevant for promoting what your business has to offer. This will help to define your startup’s social media presence more strategically and achieve your overall goal of brand awareness.

4. Maximize Social Media as a Recruitment Tool

The entrepreneurial startup spirit is increasingly more attractive these days to both recent graduates and established professionals. Social media is the perfect way to tap into the pool of available talent, but it can be a challenge to promote job vacancies on Twitter or Facebook, successfully. It’s important to identify the qualities you would like in a new hire, and to know which social platforms will offer access to prospective employees that will ultimately foster business growth.

Take a look at larger brands’ recruitment posts to see how they are reaching out for job openings. Find out if they are using Facebook or Instagram and evaluate how people are responding to their posts. Is one platform more successful than another? Big companies have mastered the art of identifying top talent and knowing who to bring into the company.

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Successfully Measuring Social Customer Service Performance

In order to grasp the full impact and ROI of social customer service, companies need to measure it in a way that enables comparison with—and benchmarking alongside—more traditional customer care channels, such as phone, email and chat. Without measuring real customer service KPIs over social, it is difficult to resource teams for spikes in volume, improve the quality of agent performance and deliver the best customer experience possible. Below I have outlined the most important metrics to measure:

Volume

What it is:

• Inbound volume — Count of incoming messages on all social channels. Allows you to understand the bigger picture, and for calculating the % of customer service issues compared to the total number of social inbound messages
• Response volume –– Count of responses issued by brand
• Volume by category — Count of messages by interaction type. This includes broad categories such as marketing messages, PR messages, and customer service messages. It also includes subcategories within these; subcategories for customer service might include the number of issues related to deliveries, product, website, etc. Make sure that this categorization matches your organization’s existing categorization used in the contact center for other channels such as phone and email, enabling you to match ‘apples to apples’
• Case/conversation volume — Count of groupings of messages pertaining to individual customer issues. By grouping messages into meaningful customer conversations, it is possible to count how many interactions agents are performing

Why it’s important:

Measuring volumes makes your other KPIs meaningful. Still, it’s important to note that they do not constitute KPIs on their own, as they don’t measure performance. You cannot control your inbound volumes or your volumes by category. Rather, these metrics are important for providing a baseline from which to understand your other metrics. It’s hard to understand what a change in handling time or response time means unless you can match them up with changes in volume over social channels.

Average Response Time & First Response Time

What it is:

• Average Response Time — Average time elapsed between all customer messages and agent replies
• First Response Time — Average time elapsed between initial customer messages and initialagent replies. This can be compared with the metric of Average Speed of Answer (ASA) on traditional channels

To illustrate the difference between the two, it’s helpful to look at this timeline of an interaction between an agent and a customer.

Why it’s important:

Regardless of channel, response time is a key driver of customer satisfaction, with first response time particularly important over social. Because of ART and FRT close relationship to customer satisfaction, these two metrics typically provide the foundation of your Service Level Agreement (SLA). A strong internal SLA for response time ensures consistency––both among agents and for your social customer service operations as a whole.  

It’s crucial that you be able to measure these metrics and your performance against your SLA in real time. If you have a sudden spike in volume, you need to be able to reallocate resources in order to bring the SLA down to baseline.

These metrics also enable you to compare your team’s performance in and out of operating hours. Many operations, especially in their nascency, are not able to scale to 24/7 social customer service. As a result you want to be sure that your hours of operation match customer expectations; if you see that your response time in business hours is wildly off from your response time overall, that can present a business case for you to shift or expand your hours of operation.

Handling Time

What it is:

• Handling Time (HT) — Amount of time agents spends processing an issue. Handling time includes all activity, including elements such as reading the issue, tagging category and marking sentiment, looking up customer account info, making any notes about the issue, and drafting responses.
• Average Handling Time (AHT) — Average amount of time agents spend processing issues over a given period. AHT can be measured for individual agents or for multiple agents if they’re handling the same issue (i.e. not re-routed, or frequent shift changes, assignments, etc.).
• Total Handling Time (THT) — Total time agents spend processing issues over a given time period.

To help clarify the difference between these three metrics, this diagram provides a timeline of an agent dealing with issues as they come in. AHT is slightly different for social than on more traditional channels such as phone, in which one issue is dealt with at a time. Issues on social are split up; you might respond to one Tweet and not return to an issue until the customer Tweets back hours later.

Why it’s important:

Handling time is one of the first true cross-channel metrics for social customer service, enabling you to compare the performance of social against performance on other channels. Measuring social customer service with traditional metrics is a challenge when social is so fundamentally different; first response time on social is fundamentally different than first response time on other channels. Handling time, however, provides the ability to clearly compare social to traditional channels such as phone and email. If it takes 10 minutes to resolve an issue via email and 5 minutes to resolve an issue on social, you have a solid justification for the ROI of your social customer service operation.

Handling time is important for agent performance evaluation. If you have an agent whose average handling time is significantly off from his peers, that might mean it’s time for some coaching from the manager. It also enables you to measure the effect of process changes you have made in your organization. For example, if you want to add an approval workflow for your agents, in which a manager spot checks 20% of all issues, you can track and benchmark the impact of the change on your handling time.

Sentiment

What it is:

• Sentiment — Qualitative assessment of customer satisfaction based on the tone and content of messages
• Sentiment Conversion — Change in sentiment as a result of brand interaction. While, individual sentiment is important to track, but it doesn’t give you a story to tell. The story comes from being able to actually see and quantify the conversion rate (from negative to positive). 

This diagram shows a sequence of interactions between a brand and customer, resulting in a successful sentiment conversion.

Why it’s important:

By measuring sentiment conversion, you can analyze the level of service you’re delivering, as well as the impact of any changes you implement (such as releasing a new tone guide). Sentiment can also contribute to your ROI model, enabling you to measure your revenue protected by improving customer sentiment.

Deflection

What is it?

• Deflection Rate — Percent of issues received over social media that are not resolved in-channel, but moved to a 1:1 channel such as phone, email or chat

Why it’s important:

Deflection is very important, but under-utilized by most organizations. In most cases, redirecting customers away from their chosen support channel is one of the worst customer service experiences possible—forcing customers to repeat themselves in a form they haven’t chosen. 65% of customers report that in-channel resolution is the most important part of a good customer service experience.

The ability to do private communication within social media (direct messages in Twitter, private messages in Facebook) means that the vast majority of customer service issues can be handled without deflecting to another channel (aside from regulated areas which may entail secure communication channels). In order to ensure the highest customer satisfaction, we recommend that brands handle customer service issues in the same channel to which they are received, wherever possible. Even in regulated industries secure web forms can be used alongside social media to provide as seamless an experience as possible.

When you are not able to solve a customer issue publicly on social due to privacy issues, you should follow up with post issue resolution on that given channel. This not only shows you still care, but allows for issues to be resolved in the public eye. Issue resolution in one-to-one communication is fine - but you must close the loop afterwards. Even just a simple thank you to the user for their time and patience can suffice. There were very few examples of this taking place when we looked deeper at the engagement of each hotel Twitter handle.

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