How to Measure the Value of What You're Doing

Understanding the value

• Receiving more e-mails than comments: The comments are great, they bring more value to the subject in question and sometimes can generate passionate conversations. However, on a monthly basis I receive more personal e-mails than comments. Intimate e-mails with personal history: this is what you should be looking for, be in touch with the people who read, follow and value your work and what you do for them. That is what changes everything - you start to bond with these people that allows you to cross the street to see them and share with them what you are doing, and getting recommended to their friends.
• Changing people: When your articles, speeches, projects or even tweets allow somebody to start a project, confront their fears, deal with delays, realise their mistakes and enable them to learn from them, or finally understand that they've got the capability to excel in whatever they want, that's when the best results start going the right way. The most powerful KPI is to how much you can change people's work, business results, perception or lifestyle - for the better.
• Being conscious about your work: There's a type of work that can't be measured and it's the one that enhances you as a professional. It might be making a podcast, it might be being reponsable for all the digital work for a NGO or even writing down your thoughts and feelings on a piece of paper and posting them on Instagram every day. Look for ways to impact the relationship between your communities.
• Stop defending and start ignoring: It's like everything, there's always that skeptical person that says, "If you can't count it, it can't be measured." This might be true, but only when you have to back your results up in front of your boss, a teacher or a client. But never think that everything has to be measured; this way of being is only for those who need to count and measure everything they do. The people who don't appreciate your work now, will never do, and that's their problem, not yours.

Always meausuring, exposing your results, showing your superiority and improving your own records. That's all great and fascinating, but only when you can turn these numbers into:

• More economical stability.
• Creating more work for you and for others.
• Changing more lives.
• Starting more projects.
• Having a group of colleagues that will help you in what you are doing.
• Work less and produce more.
• Speak about numbers that can be turned into positive effects for those who can help you achieve those numbers.

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4 Basic Methods to Measure Your Real-Time Social Media Customer Service

When it comes to social media customer service, the voice of the customer is heightened nowadays. More and more people take to social media to make a complaint, give feedback on a product, rave about a company, etc. This evolution presents a really difficult challenge: how can a company deal with these 'issues' and still create an engaging and personal customer experience?

By creating specialized social media teams that dedicate their entire time to answering every single incoming social message, companies gradually start seeing the benefits of providing real-time social media customer service.

What is the first step?

If a company is just starting to implement social media customer service, it's important to have your bases covered. This means make sure you reply to every message. Quantity wins over quality in this situation, because customers show no mercy for unanswered messages. Moreover, don't overdo it on KPI's in the beginning, implement a few and evolve as needed. Same applies to resources: start small and build organically. Don't bring in new people to whom you can't give the appropriate training.

Which basic methods for real-time measurement should a company apply?

1. Volume of incoming messages

The total volume of incoming messages gives a clear idea of how big the real-time workload on social media actually is, and how many people you should hire. In the longer term, it's important to keep an eye on how the volume of message evolves. If numbers increase, more and more people direct their questions to your social media channels. In that case, you might want to consider adding new people to your team.

2. Time to resolution

Time to resolution refers to the period it takes a customer agent to find the right information and resolve the query. In cases involving more complex issues, questions need to be directed to a specialized department. The answer has to find its way back to the customer agent who is handling the case on time. This method is especially beneficial to measure the individual performance of the customer agent.

3. Time to answer

Time to answer begins from the time in which a customer agent is assigned to a newly incoming message and lasts until the agent provides an answer and sends it out to the customer. On average, this should take about 16 to 17 minutes.

4. Number of responded posts

Any company has to strive for 'inbox zero'. Dealing with incoming messages and giving an appropriate reply to all of them, should be any customer service team's focal point. When dealing with real-time customer service, keep your attention to increasing the number of replied messages.

Make note that the speed with which every incoming message is handled, is key. It gives your team a clear indication of how well it's organized. Look at it from both angles: the speed of your entire team and the efficiency of an individual employee. Make sure your focus lays on both aspects.

How can social media customer service elevate customer engagement?

It's important not to be too repetitive when dealing with every incoming tweet. However, canned responses work fine to optimize the workflow. But, engaging with each individual by sending them a personal message, should be your goal when dealing with one-on-one communication.

Secondly, bare in mind to help the customer at the point of need. Don't redirect every customer to your social media channels once you've introduced your social media customer service team. Customers still want to reach out to a company on several touch points in the customer journey to get answers. For example, social media customer service and live chat work really well together.

In short, it's key to engage in every decision point of the customer journey and detect conversations about your product. To optimize your social media workflow, introducing a social media customer service team helps a company to direct every issue to the right department. This helps the customer at every touch point.

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Related articles

• Why Your Company Should Switch from Telephone to Live Chat and Social Media Customer Service
• The Top Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes and How to Fix Them
• Using Social Media For Great Customer Service
• Google Wants to Write Your Social Media Messages For You
• 5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Social Media Management Program in 2014

Learn These Four Classic Approaches to Marketing Campaigns

A classic marketing strategy mistake is to select tools because they are new or talked about frequently in the media.

Fascinated with the latest tool, marketing rounds (what we like to call your team) forget to select media and methods to achieve an objective.

Measurable objectives, however, often require selecting a primary approach towards the customer, after which tools are selected based on budget, time, and other resources.

There are four common approaches to marketing campaigns today.

Direct Community Interaction With Stakeholders

Whenever possible, marketers and communicators should directly interact with their primary stakeholders. Whether the topic is sales, donations, input on ideas, agreement on civil actions, public resolution of customer issues, customer reviews, or other actions, direct communication is most likely to produce outcomes—and do so quickly.

Top-Down Influence Approaches

The top-down attitude is one in which media—events, PR, some types of advertising campaigns, and well-known influencers—are used to “inform” the marketplace about new products. The message comes to the marketplace from a position of authority, and the source hopes that the positions of media voices, celebrities, and bloggers are enough to persuade customers.

The Groundswell

Not every company has the luxury of an established customer base for its products and services, nor the resources to support advertising and promotional campaigns. The groundswell method of marketing a product or service is fostering word of mouth-marketing to loyal customers by the individual, who shares with dozens, and so forth.

Flanking Techniques

The direct, top-down, and groundswell approaches are common in traditional advertising, social media, public relations, networking, and direct marketing disciplines.

But sometimes, a company has regulations and obstructions, or a lack of a loyal customer base, or no one is talking positively about it, etc. Then that communications effort must employ flanking techniques, such as advertising, content marketing, or search engine optimization (SEO) as primary tools.

All these approaches can be blended; some tools can be used across different approaches. For example, social media can be a lead tool set for groundswell approaches but provide customer support for a direct marketing campaign, or blogger relations for a top-down approach.

Similarly, approaches can support each other in a large multichannel campaign. Top-down approaches can be used to support a direct marketing campaign, much in the way that Apple launches its products with events and publicity—coinciding with strong email marketing campaigns to drive existing customers to buy.

The question becomes how to select the right approach to meet objectives.

Here are four factors your marketing team should use to select the company’s marketing approach.

1. Key performance indicators. What does strategic success for the company/product line look like?
2. The corresponding marketing objectives, whether they be lead generation, branding, or both.
3. Stakeholders and how you can communicate with them. What is your relationship with customers like? Do you have significant customers lists? Do you have a good market reputation? Are barriers in the way? Let your relationships dictate the primary approach.
4. Capacity to market to them, specifically your budget, time for success and your human resources

These components form a framework to determine the marketing round strategy and dictate your possible approaches and tools. When you list them on paper, the right strategic approach(es) become clearer, and ideas about how to use your particular tools to achieve the right result also begin to evolve. You can begin to visualize the path towards the end result.

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