how to work like a network: for the customer support professional

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT

How to Work Like a Network: For the Customer Support ProfessionalYour guide to improving onboarding, resolutions, and customer satisfaction with Enterprise Social


Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

IntroductionPart One: Checking the Vital SignsPart Two: Stepping Up to the New NormalPart Three:Customer Support = Employee Support

Table of Contents

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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.

The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other application or service that matters to your company.


For many customers, the most powerful human interaction they will have with your company is through the customer support team. Even if your brand is strong, customer sentiment will be galvanized in their times of need by positive or negative experiences.

Your team’s role is critical, because a customer’s support experience can have a potentially significant impact on the bottom line. You are the nurses of the business world: You remedy problems, prescribe methods for making things better, and care for customers with compassion.

Continual progress requires the smart integration of Enterprise Social tools into customer support. According to research organization The Social Habit, social media is already considered one of the “Big 3” support modalities, along with phone and email.

Today, when customers have a problem, they expect a rapid response from customer support, personalized service from knowledgeable and well-trained staff, and a satisfying solution tailored to their individual situation. They deserve nothing less.

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“Simply put, if you don’t use social media for support, you’ll fall behind.”

—Social Media Survey, The Association of Support Professionals

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR BUSINESS LEADERS

This e-book’s objective is to show you how to provide better customer support using Microsoft Enterprise Social. First, it describes the tools and the value of these solutions to your customer support team. Second, it presents three common customer support situations and demonstrates how Enterprise Social can improve all three in ways that can help your team have a greater impact on business growth and profitability.

Finally, it shows you how to get started working like a network to become a more informed, connected, and successful customer support team.

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Checking the Vital SignsPart One:


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The Value of Enterprise Social for Customer Support By applying the power of social networking to your customer support team, you can:

• Streamline and centralize the onboarding process for new support representatives.

• Improve quality and speed of response time with customer resolutions.

• Boost employee morale, and in turn help employees better serve customers.

With Enterprise Social, you can make easy-to-use tools available to your team. Helping everyone in your company to work like a network can help you, as a customer service professional, address some of the most significant challenges that your team may face.


Broaden Your View

Enterprise Social makes it possible for customer support teams to:

• Empower customers and decrease call volume: Support teams can set up Yammer Groups in which customers can engage with other customers and product experts online to resolve issues.

• Make good use of and easily access company experts: Staff can easily escalate difficult questions using Lync instant messaging and technical issues to internal experts when answers and solutions are not readily available.

• Gather business insights: Listen to and participate in conversations inside and outside your organization to gather valuable insights about your products and services with Microsoft Social Listening.

• Free support reps to deal with difficult issues and high-value customers: By providing various for ways for you and your team to manage more routine calls with less manpower, Enterprise Social frees you to spend your time where it will do the most good.

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Workers who use Enterprise Social technologies experience 76 percent more visibility into other company departments or locations.

—Business Insights, Yammer

76%

Stepping Up to the New NormalPart Two:


Customer support has changed dramatically over the past decade. With the rise of social and mobile technologies, consumers are now armed with user reviews, peer recommendations, and a wealth of other information that changes how they shop and make buying decisions. That, in turn, is changing the way many organizations do business, including new approaches to customer support.

It’s up to support professionals on the ground day in and day out to establish the new norms. Across all industries, we see new normals all the time—things that were not commonplace just a few years ago. You can buy blueberries in February; check your email on an airplane; watch a toddler navigate a tablet. This is the new normal, and it’s changing constantly.

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Today, it’s normal for customers to expect a faster-than-ever response time. The Social Habit survey found that over half of customers expect a response to problems posed over social media, no matter what time of day or week. The idea of office hours is fading as we increasingly access technology beyond the traditional “9 to 5.”

It’s also normal for customers to share their experiences widely and easily through social media. Research from Entrepreneur.com says 58 percent more people are likely to share their customer experiences than five years ago. Of those, 95 percent share bad customer service experiences, and 45 percent do so through social media.

You set the standard for what a normal customer experience is. That means that you may need to create an updated blueprint for the things you do every day. Enterprise Social will help you help your customers—and here’s how.

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There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

—Sam Walton, Walmart founder

Onboarding New RepsAll new employees face a learning curve. They might be overwhelmed by the amount of new information and are trying to remember where various resources are located. It is in everyone’s best interest that the onboarding process be as smooth as possible.

Enterprise Social technologies can help get everyone speaking the same language. Ensure a consistent message, a common team culture, easy access to centralized data, and integration of the new team members with the existing employees.

Your company will provide better customer support if all the new hires are up to speed and have access to the resources they need. Liz Ratto, a senior escalation engineer at Microsoft, says, “We store all of our onboarding documentation on Yammer. We can link to the profiles of people within the organization, to other notes, and to files on the network seamlessly. It helps daisy-chain it all together in a central location.”

69 percent of new hires are likely to stay longer than three years if they experience well-structured onboarding.

—Aberdeen Group

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MY JOB

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Like a family doctor, support professionals have a wide range of knowledge, but also know when to reach out for more specialized expertise. Just as your doctor may refer you to a dermatologist or endocrinologist, so support reps should take a big-picture view and know who to turn to for additional information.

Ratto says, “With Yammer, we’re able to illustrate in a much more visual way how all of our teams are connected. By having these central repositories where we keep all of our team-level documentation, we can easily link out to the other folks in the organization who help us do our jobs every day.”

Ways Enterprise Social Can Streamline Your Onboarding Process3

Centralize It

Create a centralized communication and document repository for new reps to learn procedures and best practices. Create a Yammer Group called “Support Onboarding” where you can pin important documents and links and give group updates in the feed.

Manage Your Documents

Tap into organizational knowledge from any location by using a unified document management system within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, gaining easy access to contact, account, lead, or opportunity records.

Pinpoint the Experts

Quickly find subject matter experts within your company or department and get immediate, timely responses to help make decisions and get answers faster. Get instant answers to your questions from a colleague using Lync IM or video conferencing for more complex problem solving.

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Resolving Customer IssuesAmong respondents to The Social Habit who have ever contacted a brand, product, or company through social media for customer support, 32 percent expect a response within 30 minutes, and 42 percent expect a response within 60 minutes.

Resolving customer issues is at the heart of what your team does. Doing it well comes down to two factors: speed and quality.

Speed is critical, because customers should not be left wondering whether their request has been noticed. We’ve all heard horror stories about a customer complaint posted to Twitter on a Friday that wasn’t addressed until Monday. You need to hear what problems are coming up in real time, so they can be triaged and treated appropriately. It’s hard to undo the damage caused by a vocal customer who has had a negative experience. On top of that, that same squeaky wheel could have been a vocal advocate had they received a better support experience.

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80 percent of workers who use Enterprise Social technologies are more informed about what is happening inside their organization.

—Business Insights, Yammer

80%

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Nip It in the BudProactively resolve customer issues before they become an incident, with Microsoft Social Listening. You can find out what’s top of mind for customers and what’s trending among prospects by noting customized hashtags or handles.

Know Your CustomerCapture, store, and access all relevant customer data. Yammer is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, enabling employees to analyze and interpret customer feedback and trends with your team’s collective brainpower and together determine next steps.

Know Who You’re Looking AtMeet face to face without the cost of travel. Lync video conferencing improves collaboration by establishing more trust between your team members and customers.

Share the Lessons Create a folder in OneDrive for storing and sharing insights and learning from fellow teammates about successes, best practices, and lessons learned. Yammer Document Conversations let employees comment on a file as they’re viewing it so managers can address questions as soon as they come up.

Teach Them to Fish Help customers save time and find quick answers to their questions before seeking formal support. Use Yammer networks to post general information and address FAQs as easily-accessible resource for customers.

Ways Enterprise Social Improves Knowledge Sharing and Customer Resolutions

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5Ratto says, “We use Yammer external networks to engage with customers and collect information quickly from all over the world at the same time. It’s easy to crowd source information about customer experiences that we should know about. It closes that feedback loop faster than in a traditional support model.”

But customers don’t just want fast responses, they want responses that are personal, thoughtful, and accurate. You might not know the answer to every question that comes up, but someone in your company does. Ratto says, “We’re very likely to share our expertise and knowledge. You just don’t see information hoarding in this type of culture that you might in a more traditional siloed culture.”

“With Yammer, our ability to understand and then react to a problem or build on an idea sped up dramatically. There’s no question we can serve our members better.”

—Greg Moran, SVP and CIO, Infrastructure and Operations,

Nationwide Insurance

Acclaimed author and poet Maya Angelou observed, “They may forget your name, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” It’s up to support professionals to connect with customers and help them feel truly cared for. Enterprise Social gives context to strangers, and makes the interaction more personal.

“When we see people’s profile photos and can speak to them more casually than over email, it helps us remember that a customer is a real person. Employees naturally feel more empathy and more a sense of customer advocacy. With Yammer, we feel a great sense of accountability to our customers,” says Ratto.

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Boost Employee MoraleEmployees that are happy in their job are far more likely to provide high-quality customer service. Higher employee morale means lower turnover, which means lower operation costs for your company.

One challenge to employee morale is how to build camaraderie. Coworkers may be on the same team, but often do not work together in the same office or see each other face to face.

Liz Ratto says, “My team is spread out across the whole globe, and we work across different time zones. We have a lot of remote workers who don’t interface even weekly with other team members. So having space for open discussions about work bridges those geographical gaps and makes us feel much more like a cohesive team.”

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“When you take great care of your team members, you know they’re going to take great care of your guests. That’s why we chose Yammer, so we can provide that additional support that we didn’t have before.”

—Jessica Elliot, Communications and Deployment Manager, Red Robin


And it’s not all about work. Enterprise Social tools can act as a virtual company water cooler. Ratto says, “If you see something amusing on the web, you can share it with your team and all enjoy something together.”

But so what? Your reps might recognize faces on their team overseas and share cat videos, but how could that possibly matter for business?

“Because we do feel so connected, we’re really likely to jump in and help one another out. It encourages openness and frank communication that enables people to be themselves and help others the best that they can on Yammer. We can be transparent with each other and with the rest of the organization, and that trickles down to our customer.”

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Ways to Create a Unified, Customer-centric Culture3Combine Powers

You can marry learning, operation services, and tech management on Yammer. The project management office can make sure there is continuity across departments so collectively this group can inform all changes to the customer experience.

Flip the Pyramid

Enact change in the intersection where employees meet customers. With Yammer, all employees have a voice, and ideas can be shared from the bottom up.

Get Invested

Yammer allows employees to report on conditions or situations and get an audience with company leadership, which in turn encourages further workforce participation.

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Customer Support = Employee SupportPart Three:

Star tStar t


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A customer’s support experience can have a resounding effect on your organization. According to loyalty marketing expert Frederick Reichheld, even a 5 percent decrease in customer dissatisfaction can boost profits by up to 95 percent. Yet, acquiring a new customer can cost six to seven times more than retaining an existing one. The bottom line: You want to keep the customers you have, and keep them happy.

But first you have to care for your team, before they can most effectively help customers. Whether getting new hires up to speed, finding resources to answer customer inquiries, or encouraging a positive team environment, Enterprise Social tools can support you as you deliver excellent customer support.


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Microsoft is a longtime and trusted partner for IT. Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies enable companies to engage, inform, and connect their employees, partners, and suppliers, and were awarded the top position in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. There are three primary reasons that more than 400,000 organizations have chosen Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies to improve their business:

• Enterprise-grade technology built for business – Microsoft offers companies the experience, global footprint, security, and reliability they expect from enterprise cloud solutions.

• A comprehensive and connected platform – Microsoft offers a comprehensive and deeply connected platform for delivering seamless social experiences across many familiar applications as well as customers’ data centers, service providers, and the Microsoft public cloud.

• Familiar and intuitive user experience and applications – Microsoft provides consistent, familiar, and intuitive applications across its cloud solutions to drive faster, lower-cost implementation and high user adoption, which lead to improved productivity and better business results.

To work like a network and learn about tools that help you improve onboarding, resolutions, and customer satisfaction, visit www.enterprisesocial.com.


www.enterprisesocial.com

how to work like a network: for the customer support professional

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