12 Mar SXSW Session Recap: Benefits of a Highly Responsive Community Engagement Strategy
The session “Benefits of a Highly Responsive Community Engagement Strategy”, was led by Chris Baccus and Shawn McPike, who use social media tools like Facebook and Twitter for customer support for AT&T. The two shared a wealth of findings from their first hand experiences in the space, and below are some of the notes I wrote furiously while they talked.
Scale and Resources
Within AT&T, customer support has grown from 4 to 23 representatives in the customer care side of the business who are utilized
exclusively to help comment and respond to customers on social media properties. The following are also some tidbits from this conversation around scale and resources:
- Just on Facebook, AT&T Facebook page averages around 270 wall posts/day from fans
- Usually have 1-2 people managing the social accounts at a given time
- Volume has gone up 120% year over year on Twitter, with over 50k customers being helped since August 2009
- Most customers typically expect a response within 24-48 hours
When asked about scale and resources, Baccus also noted, “We implement social listening through tools and determine what is actionable. It’s impossible to catch every conversation. We tend to do a lot of direct messaging as opposed to public messaging to figure out the real issue because every customer issue isn’t apparent.”
Q. How do you define your span of control as opposed to marketing?
A. We have a digital leadership council, and have a meeting where we discuss what is going on. When a group wants to start a Facebook page, we will evaluate the team creating the request and then have a real discussion on if one is warranted.
Q. How do you convince upper level management to grow resources within Customer Support on Social Media?
A. We’ve been lucky on the customer care side of AT&T. Before we launched, our president had TweetDeck on his computer and would ask his VP to address issues he saw, which would then come to customer support to be resolved. Our unwritten goal at first was for the customer service division to identify and answer these issues before we heard from him. This said, using metrics to identify the amount of conversations can be convincing to upper level management.
Q. Where is the tipping point of hiring?
A. We came up with a metric that identified how many interactions/month a typical customer care manager could resolve in social media. We were then able to predict how many managers would be needed across a year to present this case to upper level management.
Q. How do you manage the work flow of issues?
A. We have a detailed process chart that took about a month and a half to create. This maps out which person should respond to what on the social properties. We couple this with daily meetings to make sure we have a game plan for response.
Q. How do you regulate the responses given so the responses don’t sound like form letters?
A. We try to tweak the language so it doesn’t sound this way, but there are times when this could be difficult to regulate when you have similar questions from fans or followers that warrant similar responses. To create consistency, we have created “cheat sheets” for the team, but we also want to give them the flexibility to tweak so the responses sound more human.
Location of Engagement
When asked how brands should determine the best way to engage with customer support, Baccus suggested to conduct a listening study to find out where and how customers are engaging currently. This may mean the brand should establish a presence within select social channels, or it may mean the brand needs to go to where the conversations are already existing (like through blog outreach).
Q. What about LinkedIn?
A. We have used LinkedIn for recruitment and within B2B efforts. Generally, we’ve found it to be difficult to create open communication within this channel, and even in “Recommendations” we didn’t see a lot of depth there.
Community Guidelines
Baccus and McPike noted community guidelines are necessary to help administrators determine what to respond to. It also helps manage customer expectations around the interaction between the brand and customer.
Q. What do you do with “haters” of the brand?
A. We keep most of these posts up, and have community guidelines posted so that these people understand why a person’s comment may be deleted. Generally, when this happens we want to leave it so we have the opportunity to turn these negative commenters into equally passionate positive brand advocates.
Q. What do you do with timing of responses?
A. Having set hours generally established within the community can curb some customers from expecting all responses from AT&T to be in real time. Explaining these in the community guidelines educates new customers on when to expect a response and then we also see community members jumping into help other members on the hours we aren’t responding.
Metrics
Baccus noted metrics varies by platform. Explaining that ROI is made up of two things: Sales and Cost avoidance, he uses these two considerations to make the value proposition for their support efforts. On Facebook, AT&T uses impressions and click through rates on content shared, and then uses a CPM metric to be able to put a dollar value around impressions and click through rates.
McPike noted that AT&T’s private support forums have an added benefit to allow AT&T to track user behavior. He noted, “We can track a customer’s path from problem solving to purchasing a device. We are trying to understand the behavior and then predict how we can tie into this behavior to understand how and when to reach a customer.”
