5 must haves for social support - get satisfaction · 2015-06-25 · 5 must haves for social...

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5 MUST HAVES FOR SOCIAL SUPPORT:SUPPORT STRATEGIES TO INCREASE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND CUT COSTS

SOCIALSUPPORT

5 MUST HAVES FOR SOCIAL SUPPORT: Support Strategies to Increase Customer Satisfaction and Cut Costs 1

CUSTOMER SERVICE — A HOW NOT TO GUIDE

Chances are, you’ve had at least one harrowing encounter

with the customer service black hole of death. You know what I

mean—you’re experiencing a product issue, so you search for and

eventually locate the support email of the company in question. You

write out what you hope is a compelling and action-incentivizing

description of your problem, only to receive a generic, automated

response with an issue number that is two lines long. Despite the

written promise that someone will follow-up shortly, you never hear

back again.

This (non)response is obviously an extreme example, but

unfortunately, it’s not a rare one. Even responsive email support is

often too slow and difficult to scale to be truly valuable for you or

your customers. And if they can’t get an answer quickly (or at all,

like in our previous example), your customers are going to end up

feeling frustrated, disrespected, and with a negative opinion of your

company and product. If they have other options for providers of

the product or service you offer, they’re likely to turn to them. And

in today’s economy, there are always other options.

By limiting your customers to email or phone support as your only

or most obvious customer service option, you are likely to deliver a

poor customer experience and lose business as a result. The good

news is the black hole of death is far from your only cost-effective

option!

Contents

CUSTOMER SERVICE — A HOW NOT TO GUIDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

WHY SOCIAL SUPPORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 MULTICHANNEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 COMMUNITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3 SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE BASE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 FEDERATED SEARCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 SEO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10


WHY SOCIAL SUPPORT

It wasn’t long ago when your customers’ main means of contacting

you was an email. Today, however, your customers have adopted a

more social way of communicating online. This shift in technology

and expectations means that you have more channels to monitor

and less grace time to get back to them. Your social support

strategy must be well thought-out and articulated, so you can

keep up with the competition and provide the level of support your

customers have come to expect.

A good social support strategy involves not only responding

to questions and issues directed at you in social networks, but

creating social resources that facilitate customer conversation and

collaboration. When done well, social support allows you to hear

more comprehensively what’s going on with your customers. It

serves as a great resource for you as well as for them.

An example: Just last week, Scott Hirsch, the VP of Product

Marketing here at the Satisfactory, was having an issue getting

MOG music to play on his Sonos system. Instead of calling or

emailing Sonos directly, Scott went to their customer community

to search and see if anyone had reported a similar issue there.

He found that other community members had experienced the

same thing, and of them had called Sonos directly to discover the

solution. Scott got his answer quickly without ever posting in the

community or contacting Sonos. The answer was there in real-time

because of the collaboration that is naturally facilitated by social

support. One person called Sonos and posted about the solution

in their community. This prevented every other customer with the

question from placing one-off calls to support, saving them time

and the company money. This is the power of a support strategy

that combines social and traditional support tactics.

The benefits to social support for your company and your

customers are great, but in order to get the most return on your

investment in it there are some critical components to include.

We’ve identified the Five Must Haves to deliver excellent social

support that will drive great customer experiences and allow you

to scale your business while reducing one-off support requests

and costs as a result. Make sure to include them in your support

strategy for a complete plan that will keep you competitive and

delivering the kind of service your customers demand.


Sonos social support means customers are able to find answers to their questions and problems in real

time as they happen. They’re able to tap into the experiences of the more than 5,700 other customers using

the community for a higher quality of support than the Sonos support team alone could provide.


1 MULTICHANNEL

Gone are the days where your customers are all at home, reaching

out to you on their desktop computer or landline. No, today’s

customers are on the go, dropping off their kids at soccer practice,

sending emails, ordering team snacks to be delivered, while

scheduling hair appointments, and trying to get your product to

work. If your support isn’t flexible and easy for them to reach, they

will turn to one of your competitors who can help them on their

terms.

In today’s environment, a key component of a successful social

support strategy is accessibility to your customers wherever they

are, on whatever platform they’re using. The effectiveness of your

social support will increase exponentially as more people begin

participating in it, so you want to have as many channels and

entry points as you can reasonably maintain (the operative word

here being reasonably — if you don’t have resources to operate an

additional support Twitter account, you’re better off without it).

That means you need to make sure your social support is

accessible on the various channels where your customers can

expect to reach your company — on mobile and tablet, on social

network sites, and in relevant places on your website (not just stuck

in a support ghetto on one isolated page). Don’t worry, you don’t

have to swear off sleep in order to provide social support around

the clock, which brings us to our next social support must-have…


2 COMMUNITY

It doesn’t matter how well you’ve branded your Facebook, Twitter,

SlideShare, and Pinterest pages—no social strategy is complete

without a customer community. Social networks can provide great,

real-time feedback, are easy for your customer to access, and allow

you to communicate updates to them quickly. Only a customer

community, however, is designed to truly facilitate and host

numerous conversations surrounding your product and services at

any time of the day or night.

You may ask: “What is a community?” Remember the forums

you used to turn to in the 90’s? Customer communities are the

evolution of these forums. They are interactive, open networks

where people come to engage around the products and services

they care about. Customer communities are always on, connecting

people to one another, your company, and the answers they’re

looking for.

Get Satisfaction communities are fun, friendly, and intuitive. They

take the best user experience elements of Twitter and Facebook in

order to provide a user-friendly, social experience that is designed

to facilitate positive, productive interactions between customers

and companies. Get Satisfaction also provides the option to

bring one-off conversations from Facebook or Twitter into your

community so that helpful but fleeting content is preserved as

a long-lasting community resource for future customers and

prospects.

Once in the community, these conversations have the added bonus

of being easily discoverable by search engines (more on why later)

and embeddable in relevant places all over your website — next to

specific products, in the checkout page, etc. This organization and

conversational style takes the shouting match that social media

often resembles and turns it into a dynamic resource that is easy

for your customers to find, navigate, and self-serve their own

answers.

Customer communities have another leg up on more traditional

social networking sites — the easy identification and activation

of Champions. Customer Champions are those extra-awesome

customers who come to your aid in your community and on

social networks to answer the questions of prospects and other

customers, to advocate on your behalf, and even to come to your

defense when things go wrong or someone expresses public

negativity about your brand. Customer communities make it easy

to identify and incentivize these Champions with public recognition,

badges, and even a formal Champs program. By making it clear

that you value your most active, helpful customers, you foster an

environment that encourages other customers to behave that way

as well. This kind of collaboration with customers, Champions,

prospects, and employees is exactly what social support is all

about.


Prezi leverages Champs for better hiring!

The power of Champions is not to be underestimated. Prezi.com routinely hires support agents who are

Champions in their Get Satisfaction community. The rationale is that these people have already proven to

understand and excel in the community forum that Prezi uses for support. They’re comfortable with the

collaborative nature of social support, and they clearly have enthusiasm for the Prezi product and customers.

Prezi encourages their Champs with recognition like Champion of the month programs. This incentivizes

champions to come back and continue to act as excellent resources for other customers and prospects.


3 SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE BASE

Your company might already have a traditional Knowledge Base

(KB), even if it’s just a list of Frequently Asked Questions on your

website. But if you don’t have a Social KB, you’re missing out on the

opportunity to leverage the value your customers can bring you and

one other. When trying to scale support and keep up with the fast-

paced speed of business brought around by the adoption of social

everything, only a Social KB can help you tap into the knowledge

and experiences of your customers to deliver a comprehensive

KB experience in real-time. Why? Because your customers are

constantly updating it with their questions, solutions, and stories.

This doesn’t just have implications for the way you address issues,

but how you spot them as well. It doesn’t matter how many people

you have QAing your product, it’s likely that at some point there

will be a bug that your customers catch before you do. A Social

KB can help you to identify and provide solutions or work-arounds

for issues that might not even be on your radar if you didn’t have

a dynamic, social place for your customers to report them. By

leveraging your customers as an integral piece of your product

testing and first-response support strategy, you’re adapting to the

ways social has changed business and using it in a way that is truly

innovating and collaborative.

Not only is a social KB an important resource because of when your

customers are referring to your products and services, but also

how they are referring to them. The internal language your team

uses to talk about various features and issues isn’t necessarily the

language your customers use to describe your product. If you only

offer a traditional KB, it becomes more difficult for your customers

to self-serve their own answers, since they don’t speak (or search

for) your internal jargon. With a social KB, customers are asking and

answering questions in their own language, so they’re more likely to

find the answers they need themselves. (This also has benefits for

SEO, but more on that later.)


4 FEDERATED SEARCH

Even in the social age, there are still benefits to having static

repositories of sanctioned company knowledge and information—

traditional KBs, FAQs, and Product directories are all helpful to your

customers since they know that the answers posted there were, at

one time at least, accurate. But as we’ve covered in the Must Haves

about community based support and social KB, these days you

can’t afford to go without social options for bug and issue reporting

to leverage the knowledge of your customers to help one another,

and to provide the most current information and assistance.

Federated search allows you to surface information from

multiple repositories — it pulls information from places like your

traditional KB, FAQ, customer communities, product directories,

etc — bringing the best of all your traditional and social channels

together in one unified place. This gives your customers access to

the maximum amount of information, both social and non-social, to

provide them with the type of information that’s right for them.

Koodo Uses Federated Search for Maximum Coverage

The Koodo implementation of Federated

Search allows customers to see the latest

social ideas, questions, and answers about

setup from their Get Satisfaction community,

while still providing access to traditional FAQs

about the process from their website.


5 SEO

To make sure your social support is as effective as possible, it’s

critical to make sure it ranks well in search engines. Why, you might

be asking? Think about it. You have a question about a product or

service. You could:

A) Dig up the phone number or email address for their support

B) Ask your smartest friend what to do

C) Just ask Google

Most people are going to go with option C, at least initially. If the

answers to your customer questions are easy to find using search

engines, their satisfaction from the experience is going to go up,

and your costs associated with one-off phone calls and email

responses are going to go down.

A Get Satisfaction customer community is uniquely structured

to help its communities rank well in search. The URL of each

community topic has the company name in it, as well as the topic

title phrased in the words of the person who asked the question.

That means that each link is highly optimized for the company

name and the natural, organic language that customers are using to

ask questions and report problems.

Remember earlier when we were talking about how the language

you use internally to talk about products, features, and bugs may

not align with how your customers refer to them? The language

discrepancy can make it difficult for your customers to find the

answers to their questions in traditional FAQs and knowledge

repositories. The structure of community topic URLs directly

combats that issue since customers are likely to ask, answer, and

search about questions and issues in similar language.

Also, Get Satisfaction is home to 70,000 communities. Because

of the sheer size of the network, as well as the high volume of

customer-generated content and engagement that takes place

there, search engines crawl the entire Get Satisfaction platform

extremely regularly. And user-generated content is viewed as

authoritative by Google, so it ranks particularly well. Once a topic is

posted, it’s likely to start showing up in search almost immediately.

The implications of this are simple. When a customer has an issue

and posts it in your community, you can address the issue quickly

and simply there. Then everyone else that has that issue will be able

to find that conversation and help themselves (like Scott was able

to find his own, up-to-date answer to his Sonos question). And when

the issue is resolved, you can post an update or status change,

automatically notifying everyone who follows that topic and closing

the loop for good.


Mint.com — An SEO Success Story

Mint.com was growing rapidly, so they implemented a Get Satisfaction customer community to scale support. They quickly realized that their

community allowed them to tap into the knowledge of their customers to answer basic product questions, freeing up their agents to focus

on more technical issues. They were also blown away by the SEO indexing provided by the community. “If you search on Google for Mint plus

your bank’s name, you’re going to see satisfaction.mint.com in the top one or two results. The indexing is awesome with Get Satisfaction,”

said Stephen Mann, Group Manager of Customer Care at Mint at the time the community was implemented. Because customers are finding

the answers to their questions on their own using search and the community as a resource, Mint has reduced support tickets by 75%!


CONCLUSION

Successful companies aren’t just developing a presence on social

networks to provide support. They’re crafting social support

strategies in order to leverage this new way of connecting with

customers to reduce costs, scale support, and provide a better

customer experience. Your particular strategy will vary depending

on the resources (man power, time, and budget) you can allocate

to it, as well as your company size and market, but a social support

strategy that is well thought out and suited for your company is

critical to stay competitive. Make sure to include these Five Must

Haves, and your social support strategy will be off to a great start!

Interested in learning more about how a Get Satisfaction customer community can help you acquire more customers, drive product innovation, and deliver excellent, low-cost social support?

877-339-3997to schedule a demo, or visit us at

https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/solutions/index

5 must haves for social support - get satisfaction · 2015-06-25 · 5 must haves for social...

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