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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How Twitter Learned to Compete with Email Marketing

When it comes to measurable digital marketing, nothing beats email.

For every post that goes to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, a single email newsletter is more “valuable,” because it’s more trackable. For all of the engagement opportunity that social sites present, they are all notoriously difficult to measure outside of network growth.

By contrast, email marketing lets us see when an a message has been:

• received
• bounced
• opened
• clicked (+ what was clicked)
• unsubscribed
• socially shared
• and forwarded

This is why you hear the expression “build your list.”  In short, it’s extremely trackable.  As an email list grows, marketers can begin inserting ads, for additional revenue.  Based upon what people click, a marketer can segment its audience.  Most social sites can’t compete with that…

Here’s how Twitter will learn to compete head on with email marketing. 

Changes in incoming messages: The Follow -vs- The List

Twitter has essentially two forms of messages: public and private.  It’s one of the things that makes the network so appealing to so many: simplicity.

Direct Messages (Private messages) can only be initiated from the followed, to the follower.  Said differently, you can only send private messages to people that are following you.  To a certain extent this equates to an email opt-in, or at least that’s how it could be…

At one point in time, the “follow” made sense.  That time was years ago, and well before following more than 100 people.  Since then, the follow has lost some of its luster and the Home Feed quickly became a noisy playground of randomness. The only way to clearly follow multiple topics or interests is to create lists. With the advent of lists, the “follow” has become less about who’s content you want to receive, so much as it is opening up the opportunity to receive direct messages from the entity you follow.

Lists are currently capped at 20.  But Twitter is smart, and following in the footsteps of Google+ circles, will remove the limit to the number of lists you can have.

Twitter will begin treating the follow as an opt-in and will begin marketing it as such, while simultaneously encouraging the creation of lists to curate content.

How Twitter takes on Email Marketing

To take on email marketing Twitter needs to be able to offer targeted, trackable messaging at scale.  This means that it’s not enough to make it trackable, it has to be easy and scalable.  That means sending to multiple people simultaneously.  Can you imagine if email marketing made you send newsletters one-by-one?  The way Twitter will take on email is to enable mass direct messaging with tracking.  Remember, the follow is now treated as an opt-in.

To illustrate how it works, I’ll use an example.

I’m a Knicks fan, so I choose to follow the Knicks on Twitter.

The Knicks decide to put me on one of their lists called “Out of Town Fans.”  One weekend the Knicks are set to play a home game at Madison Square Garden, and notice that ticket sales have slumped a little.  They decide to offer a weekend getaway package in conjunction with the Holiday Inn.  They populate a direct message and send it out to the list called “Out of Town Fans.”  Only the people on the list that are following the Knicks will receive the message.

I wake up, look at my direct messages and since I follow the Knicks, I notice the message. I open it up, click the link, hit the landing page and decide to take advantage of it.

On the backend, the Knicks drop into a Twitter dashboard, which they pay a yearly fee to access (#revenue). In that dashboard, they are able to see the results of that particular tweet campaign.  They can see clickthrough rates, who unfollowed (unsubscribed) and if someone deleted it.  Much like an email marketing campaign, these individuals would all be tracked.  The Knicks would know exactly who opened, clicked, unsubscribed, etc.  Twitter will also build this dashboard to easily integrate or export to various CRM systems.  Smart, eh?

Furthermore, the dashboard lets the Knicks see through a Twitter search, if anyone reshared it publicly.  They can combine all of this data with their website analytics data and get a pretty clear picture of how things are working using Twitter.

Oh, the Spam

So maybe you are wondering, what about all those spammers?  Well, simple enough…unfollow.  It’s just like an unsubscribe.

If you really want to see what Nicki Minaj has to say but are sick of getting her ridiculous Direct Messages trying to sell you pink wigs, glitter and fake butts, just unfollow. You can still follow her public insanity by putting her in a list.

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Digital Strategy: 4 Psychology Tips to Improve Brand Messaging

What is good brand messaging? Sitting in brainstorms I often hear terms such as voice, tone, style, none of which are incorrect - when we build our digital strategy campaigns and / or social media plans, each of the three has a part to play and certainly cannot be wrong. But should we be doing more, can the message be made stronger? For my part I believe the answer is yes; in digital and especially in social we need to embrace the fact that our audiences are people and brand messages need to be tailored to them. Whilst this is stating the obvious, the methods and challenges of tailoring message are manifold, but if we are going to get creative in improving message, I believe a route that deserves investigation is psychology. I should give a brief warning at this point - I am not a psychologist and this isn’t a psychology article, but as digital marketers we owe it to our clients and brands that we work with to pick the best from all disciplines, and the human condition is certainly a discipline worth review.

The importance of message

There are many ways that message can be wrapped up to purvey its importance, but put simply: It's what we do!

The line between message and communication is a fine one - by its very nature 'message' encompasses communication, but it goes beyond that:

• message is communication with an agenda
• message is communication with goals
• message is the dirty little desire for power through communication

For every altruistic statement, gesture and ambivalent overtone, as a species we do not 'communicate' so much as 'message'. We give out and receive messages in many different ways, through all of our senses, gestures, musings and actions; we also deal with message through tone, style and timing. Our innate use of message also goes beyond to factor in methods of delivery and route, including societal, influence, projection, empathy and disruption – each strengthening the message to achieve specific goals.

Is the previous description a correct one, however? Is not this post a message in itself and should there - or could there - be another way to describe the concept of message? It would be just as easy to distil the earlier bullet pints into a statement along the lines of:

“Message is the medium that defines communication along routes to enable clearer understanding to achieve common goals through shared information exchange.”

Nothing in the two descriptions is contradictory, except perhaps in the underlying ethical approach; however, the medium of message remains unaltered. What should be clear from both is that message is important, ingrained, and, if positioned correctly, very powerful.

And the psychology?

Psychology has proven itself invaluable in marketing where the expenditure on awareness and margins of action can transpose themselves into significant changes on the bottom line of a campaign. I am not a robot, you are not a robot - when we engage and strive to convey a message, we are doing so as individuals. In understanding the psychology, desires and reasoning of the audience targeted by the digital campaign, each message can be tailored to deliver the best results. The following 4 tips are just some examples of how psychology can be used to enhance message.

Social styles with Merrill and Reid

You can’t please all of the people all of the time - this is certainly true if you take into account the work by Merrill and Reid on personality types. No one will fall exclusively into one of the personality type boxes, but we do have majority types and will struggle most to bond with those diagonally opposing us. For brand message this can be tricky, because audiences will likely encompass all of the personality types; this is where digital and social has an advantage across traditional media - we can engage. Through any social media platform we have to be true to brand guidelines when broadcasting, but when we move into a one-on-one, or brand to small groups, we should use personality types to gently tailor the message to those individuals or small filtered groups to make it stick.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Call to Action

Placidity is rarely a recipe for progression, and cognitive dissonance can be used to agitate action from audiences. Making an audience feel slight discomfort may seem an odd approach, but from a message approach, if you are also providing a call to action (CTA) which will ostensibly remove that discomfort, it can provide the trigger which will stimulate people to action. Cinemagraph display banners work with this to overcome advertorial blindness (with the average person exposed to over 3,000 adverts online each day, we have become at best ambivalent to most ads), by disrupting evaluation and implying subliminal additional message to gain attention (message is present in all creative executions). The simplest way to understand cognitive dissonance and calls to action is to consider a life buoy (CTA), thrown to a drowning person (audience member induced into cognitive dissonance). Of course if the life buoy is being pulled in by cannibals, the person can reflect on their decision from the cooking pot, but that is another set of choices (I do not condone cooking your audience btw).

Creative emotion with James-Lange and memory

We all want our clients' brands to be loved, but do we ever look at the emotion of love - or emotions at all? It is no longer enough that a Facebook page 'looks good' - obviously it's a starting point, but what do you want the audience to feel? James-Lange theory in short states that emotion is derived from physical stimuli ('I am crying - I must be sad'), rather that physical stimuli derived from emotion ('I am sad, therefore I cry'). It is not fully accepted, but both approaches are intrinsically tied. At first glance it does seem a world away from brand message, but, tied with memory, consider the following:

• The creative in the message induces a reaction / builds on a memory to induce reaction
• The reaction forms an emotion (either desired, or combined with the cognitive dissonance approach to make the audience more receptive)
• The message continues to align the brand against the desired emotion
• The audience, the emotion and the brand start to become aligned

To be effective in this way, brand messages need to start to engage with more than just flat visual approaches and utilities - where possible, they need to stimulate our others sense and cognitive processes. We've all seen videos that move from serene landscapes to people / ghosts / objects jumping out of the screen and screaming, built specifically to shock - working in this way, we have to look at where to take the audience after shocking them. What do we want to make them feel, long-term?

Through the looking glass self with Cooley and Maslow

Cooley states with the 'looking glass self' that we form our picture of self through our interactions and the perceptions of others; in today’s digital age our interactions are increasingly (and for digital natives majorly), on social media platforms. How people project their image of self across social media involves an aspirational self, a self that they wish to become. As we hunt for amplification through brand advocates in social media channels, the brand message can be used to allow potential advocates to wrap themselves in the reflected values of the brand, so moving Cooley into social media self expression:

• We imagine how we must appear to others with the brand.
• We imagine the judgment of that appearance bolstered by the brand.
• We develop our self through the judgments of others raised by the brand.

Brand message therefore needs to reflect into the aligned audience, to build upon their image of self so that they experience worth from their alignment. This, of course, does come close to the final tiers ofMaslow's hierarchy of needs:

Growth of self - both esteem and self-actualisation - needs to be possible across message. To make sure this happens, we have to consider that digital messaging is not a single transaction with our audience, rather, it is an engagement; it happens across time and multiple channels. For example, the steps within a Facebook application are engagement, the pages and actions are a conversation that builds into the bigger message; the question is, armed with Cooley and Maslow, 'are we allowing our audience to become part of that conversation, or are we just talking to them?'

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