How Facebook & Twitter are building the NextGen Customer Service Experience

A seamless Customer Experience is being led by Facebook and Twitter, offering businesses and consumers new ways and tools to level-up the game.

The Facebook Customer Experience Blueprint

Facebook is releasing at a regular basis new features to consolidate its vision of what could be the NextGen Customer Service Experience. These features are the basis of an omni-channel Facebook centric enterprise. Be it mobile, or online, for small businesses or big ones, public or private, Facebook is building a structure to support every kind of Customer Service relationship.

Let’s have a look at the features catalogue now.

1-Keywords moderation & Profanity Blocklists

This is how you can handle appropriately the flux of spammy inbounds and trolls messages. Even if it could be used to hide some angry customers feedback. Brands will need to be careful on how they manage these filters.

2-Saved Replies and Message Templates

Business Page owners have the ability, via Facebook, to save a batch of canned responses and regularly-used-answers to save time and improve their workflows for managing customer inbounds.

These could be the usual responses to ask for case reference number for example, or thanking customers for their feedback, or the regular “How can I help you ?”.

These canned responses can also be customized and auto-populated based on First Name & Last Name for example. And this is something already available in a variety of Customer Service Softwares like Zendesk.

3-Customer Support and Updates with Messenger

Customers can ask for help and support directly through Messenger in a one-to-one conversation with the brand. Businesses are also able to send regular updates for order confirmation, shipping and real-time conversations to answer product inquiries. The support is also powered with a Zendesk partnership, and can be integrated with the Live Chat Platforms for e-Commerce.

4-Brand Responsiveness Badges

Facebook added a new feature, a badge, that display the responsiveness rate of a brand to their consumers inbounds. The “Very Responsive” badge displayed on the Brand’s Profile Page, have two requirements : Over the last 7 days, the brand must have responded to 90% of the messages and maintained a median response time of 5 minutes for all replies sent.

Response time and response rate are now “officially” 2 major criteria for Brands appeal.

5-Send Message call-to-action button

Business can add a call-to-action link within their ads to engage conversations with the consumers and answer questions in a private one-to-one discussion, instead of the public exchange like we used to see it.

The Twitter Customer Service Strategy

Twitter is tackling the Customer Service Experience in a different way, leveraging the Big Data tools and the advanced analytics to convince brands. The pitch is based on 5 main value propositions :

Improved customer experience and satisfaction : 85 percent of customers who have a satisfactory interaction are likely to recommend the brand to others.

Operational savings : Twitter customer service can save up to 80 percent per interaction compared to phone calls.

New service-to-sales and revenue opportunities

Continuous insight and analytics

Brand building and earned media

51% of Americans have reported switching service providers due to poor customer service.

Leading B2C companies are responding to about 60% of Tweets directed at their service accounts.

Consumer engagement with brands on Twitter grew 2.5x in two years.

81% of consumers do not recommend a brand to their friends if the brand did not respond to their inquiry.

And from a technical perspective, the new Twitter Partnerships with Solution Vendors in the marketplace, are focused on delivering 4 main promises :

• Provide rich context about customers: Customer service agents will be able to provide better service through contextual insights about a customer.
• Create moments of delight: Move beyond resolving customer requests for service to identifying users who are publicly sharing moments and creating a delightful experience for them.
• Understand customer needs: Deepen understanding of customers’ needs by enabling analysis of Tweets along with internal company data.
• Measure impact: By seeing metrics for impressions and engagements, brands can measure their audience, get insights from their interactions and prioritize conversations that need attention.