#conversocial

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/instagram-improves-customer-service-with-conversocial/

Instagram Improves Customer Service With Conversocial

Instagram has teamed up with social customer service software company Conversocial to help brands communicate better and faster with their customers’ comments and questions directly on Instagram.

Customer queries on Instagram often get buried or go unanswered for long periods of time, if at all. Support teams are usually made up of marketers, not customer service representatives.

The partnership underscores Instagram’s wide consumer appeal and the importance of engaging customers via the platform with content and improved customer service.

Sixty-seven percent of companies believe that social customer service is growing in importance and is the most pressing short-term priority for contact centers in the U.S. and U.K., according to Forrester research.

Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube are already using intelligent workflow software. The Conversocial platform allows social customer service agents to prioritize content, identify and respond to comments and assess quality control of brands’ responses. Key customer service metrics such as first response time are handled via a centralized dashboard.

Conversocial recently announced the addition of $5 million to its current round of funding, bringing the total round to $9.4 million.

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/why-social-needs-to-be-integrated-into-customer-service-processes/

Why Social Needs to Be Integrated Into Customer Service Processes

Social has long seemed a natural fit for marketing. Still, in many cases, social media sits outside of the marketing department, while studies indicate that deeper integration makes social media teams more useful.

Joshua March, co-founder and CEO of customer relationship management platform Conversocial, noticed a similar challenge with the rise in social customer service.

“Social needs to be deeply integrated into relevant business units in order to deliver the best experience to customers and get the most efficiency in value for the company,” March says.

Indeed, customers are turning to social media with their customer service requests, but brands simply aren’t meeting the demand. According to a Forrester study commissioned by Conversocial, nearly 70 percent of businesses see social customer service as a pressing concern. But marketing since marketing owns social, marketing usually selects a tool best suited for social media marketing and management.

“Obviously for marketing, social needs to be integrated with marketing,” March says. “But from a customer service perspective, [social] needs to be deeply integrated into the customer service technologies and how you do customer service, the processes and workflows.”

Bottom line: The social media management suites are often great for marketing, but don’t fit the needs of the customer service teams. March recommends a stand-alone social solution such as Conversocial, specifically optimized to achieve the objectives of customer service teams. In fact, the Forrester report indicates that companies that invest in a dedicated social customer service platform are able to measure, optimize and standardize customer service delivery for an improved customer experience.

This debate belies what March calls three stages of social customer service maturity:

Stage No. 1: Social starts purely as a marketing activity Stage No. 2: Customer service is helping but social is still owned by marketing Stage No. 3: The call center takes responsibility for social customer service

“When companies reach [the third] stage, they’re able to respond faster to customers, deliver a much better level of service, and it’s an all around better world for everyone,” March says. He adds that while customer care teams need some level of communication with marketing teams, the two teams have very different objectives within the business and they interact very little on a day-to-day basis.

Ultimately, having a dedicated social customer service tool enables the customer service team respond faster, resolve issues and empowers the team to manage the social channels based on the departmental priorities. March notes that while marketing teams are great at general engagement, customer service teams are the ones that actually resolve problems.

“When someone has a genuine issue, they don’t want someone to say sorry,” March says.

Enables businesses to provide customer service over social media. We combine a leading software platform with our expertise in implementation and training to give businesses everything they need to establish social media as an official customer service channel. Our technology is uniquely designed for high-volume customer service engagement - featuring a prioritisation engine to identify immediately actionable content, highly customisable workflows and permissions systems, relevant analytics, and an intuitive interface that's easy for agents to learn and use. 

I was asked to write a guest blog by Mike at Social Penguin back in November after entering in a Twitter debate with Virgin Media. After reading his blog post about Virgin Media’s poor social customer service, I was shocked that they provided such poor online service. 28 days to respond to an email says it all really!

I’m a blogger and work as a social media manager and have learnt social as I go along, trying and practising new ideas all the time. I have put together a few guidelines that I have developed over the past year which may help you if you’re just starting to provide social customer service. I don’t believe there is a ‘right’ way of doing things; it depends on your business and what works for your brand. I hope you will find the following pointers useful and things to definitely avoid!

1) Don’t wait for customers to contact you directly. Track your brand name with a good social media monitoring tool and offer proactive help. I love this example from Tesco, who proactively responded to this unhappy customer in friendly conversational tone.

Tesco could have then followed this up with a Random Act of Kindness (RAOK) and actually sent this customer some Krispy Kreme donuts to cheer up him; this would really have gone above and beyond. You can read more about RAOK in this Trendsetting report from 2011, which actually features some work I did with Biotherm Beauty back in February 2011.

2) Be fast. 81% of Twitter users expect a response the same day and 30% expect a response within 30 minutes! That’s why a good process and team organisation is essential so you could respond quickly and with the right information. Taking these statistics into account, I recommend setting an initial target of acknowledging customer queries within 3 hours and resolving the same working day if they are complex. I predict customer expectations will increase dramatically so continually look to reduce that time all the time. If you are a financial services company as well, social media can really help to solve any grumbles before they become written formal complaints.

3) Integrate social media into your existing customer service function. In most companies, PR and Marketing teams do not have access to customer data. So apart from flagging to Customer Services, PR and Marketing teams are unable offer a great deal to help the customer if the query is related to their account. Start off small and train a few customer services staff who are enthusiastic and get social. Monitor all interactions and assign customer queries to them. Look to resolve the query on the customer’s chosen channel (social media) and do not discuss personal details in the public space. Always move to private message or DM if it involves checking customer data and if it becomes too complex you could offer to phone if the customer prefers. Once you have sorted the issue through private message or DM, take it back to the original tweet or comment. This shows you have actually delivered good service and doesn’t leave people on your page or channel wondering what the resolution was.

4) Offer value on the chosen channel. Make sure you actually offer to help in your response, don’t just copy and paste a call centre number! This is what Virgin did and it really irritates me when I see examples of this. If your customer chose that specific social channel to get in contact with your brand, there is a reason. Redirecting your customers to a website or contact number means they have to do more work, providing a bad customer experience. Escalating social customer service problems to other media is also time consuming – for both the company and your customers.

5) Follow up. Don’t forget to follow up after you’ve helped the customer – are they happy, do they need anything else from you? You can build long term relationships and brand ambassadors by providing good customer service. Social customer service focuses on solving customer issues so that they become ambassadors for the brand. This in turn drives tangible benefits to the bottom line which will be appreciated from above believe me!

Los llamados Social CRM o herramientas de atención al cliente en Redes Sociales nos permiten gestionar toda la información que recibimos por parte de los usuarios de una manera efectiva con el fin de poder atender a todos los clientes y gestionar adecuadamente el feedback que recibimos.

At the beginning of this month, Jemima Kiss at the Guardian asked me what my forecasts were for 2011. My answers (below) were originally published on the PDA blog on the 1st of January here. 

What will 2010 be remembered for? 

"2010 is the year that tablet computing has really taken hold, from iPhone and Android to iPads and all the other upcoming tablets - along with the creation of a number of significant businesses building touch software, from games to utility applications. Tablets allow a multitude of devices and items that formerly required their own specialised, physical objects, to be built entirely in software - so the iPhone and iPad are now music players, cameras, alarm clocks, newspapers, books, movie players, document scanners, gaming devices, email devices, tube maps, tv remotes... a few years ago all of these were individual items. The fact that my iPhone can scan documents better than my scanner can is pretty amazing, and this is primarily allowed because of the fully flexible nature of touch screen tablets, as their controls and features have almost no physical limitation.

"In terms of what we've learnt, this year there has been a real acceptance of the dominance and importance of Facebook (and Twitter, so some extent) - especially for businesses, which are not just shifting marketing budget into social platforms in huge amounts, but also have really learnt that to be in these channels properly, they have to dedicate real resource, across departments - especially customer support. They can't just throw money at it - too many companies have been burnt by poor social media management. 

What was your best and worst moment?

"The best was definitely launching Conversocial to the public in July, a social media management system that we had been working on since late 2009, and which has had a great reception. We're seeing more and more companies set up dedicated resource to manage communications and marketing through social platforms, and they need tools to help them manage that.

"My worst was just before Christmas - waiting for three hours in a horde of angry passengers for the Eurostar, which we didn't manage to get on. There was an absolute lack of communication from Eurostar about what was going on, and although they've got their act together slightly more, simply tweeting to people that they're doing their best doesn't help if they don't give out any actual info. Being on Twitter, even responding to people, doesn't make a difference if your staff don't have the information or ability to actually help people." 

What's your hot tip for 2011? 

"It's been a massively exciting year in the tech startup world in London. There are a number of companies that have been steadily developing over the past couple of years that are showing real growth in terms of users, customers, and importantly revenue. In 2011 a lot of these are going to break out as major international companies, which will encourage more venture investment into UK companies, at earlier stages. There have been a lot of wannabes in the start up world in London in the past couple of years, next year I think we're going to be seeing some real, serious business coming out of it."