Designing Social Customer Support
How to help businesses reach their customers
When it comes to providing customer support, best practice states that you have to meet the customer where they are. Today, “where” is increasingly on social media. In fact, 81% of millennials prefer social support over phone, email or web chat. Unfortunately, 86% of the social messages that customers send to companies are ignored by those very companies today.
In this post, Kristen Muramoto and I will talk about the use of social media in customer support, our research and strategies to help Salesforce customers provide all of you with the best social customer support, and how we put those strategies into action when designing our social support tools.
Social is different
What are so many companies getting wrong and how can they improve? Social customer service (SCS) leverages social media to resolve customer issues. For example, when a customer posts a question about a delayed flight on Twitter and @ mentions an airline, the airline can then immediately respond to the customer to book him/her on a different flight. SCS is quite different from traditional support channels like email or phone because it is:
- An extension of the brand: The sense of humor, personalization, and language a company’s representatives use are all extensions of the brand. Ignoring messages from customers is equally a reflection of the brand.
- Visible: Unlike email, live chat, or phone support, every customer interaction is public. A hastily written response can go viral fast.
- Faster: Support on social is faster than on any other channel and customers expect a speedy response. In fact, customers expect a response within an hour and will wait a max of 4 hours.
- A deflection channel: The average cost of a social interaction is only $1 compared to $6 for a call center interaction.
Research insights about SCS
Kristen Muramoto and I (Designer and Researcher, respectively) are part of the Service Cloud UX team. Our team is responsible for the user experience of customer service products like the Service Console (the tool service agents use to resolve your issues), LiveAgent (the chat experience a consumer uses to communicate with an agent), and SCS (the tools that enable agents to respond to your social media posts), among others.
Given the growing importance of social media in the service industry, we have conducted field research on SCS over the past year. Visits to call centers in very different industries highlighted just how difficult it is to get social right. Compared to phone and email support, social is in its infancy and there is little documentation on best practices. The most common mistakes we observed include:
- Lack of expertise: Social media is constantly evolving. To start, companies need to know where to allocate their resources, as well as stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends (e.g., chatbots).
- Organizational confusion: The lines between Marketing and Customer Support are undefined on social media. This leads to disrupted workflows and arguments about policies on who can respond to which issues.
- Additional technology investment: The sheer volume of incoming posts can overwhelm agents. To scale, companies need tools to listen across social channels and help categorize and triage posts.
- Failure to engage: Customers expect responses within an hour on social media so companies need to be prepared to act fast. Ignoring negative feedback can be fatal. “Hugging your haters” can turn detractors into the biggest advocates.
- “Set and forget” leads to failure: Companies must constantly update their tools based on new products or services being offered, as well as new jargon, hashtags, etc..
In other words, SCS requires a much larger investment in time, ongoing education, and technology than many companies realize or are willing to make; however, to stay relevant and meet customers where they are, companies must make the investment.
For example, 26% of customers turn to social media when they can’t reach a customer support representative through other means. These are the customers that are most desperate for immediate support so listening on social media for these pleas is critical to customer satisfaction.
10 Strategies for Social Customer Support
This summer, our user research intern, Demi Boe, conducted interviews with subject matter experts, a literature review, and competitive analysis on SCS. We combined this information with what we learned in field research to identify 10 best practices in SCS shown below. You can read about each of the 10 strategies in more detail here.
Designing for social: Putting these strategies into action
As a millennial, Kristen thought designing an experience for social media should come innately. But remove the smiling selfies, throw in a crowd of angry customers and an agent who has 4 minutes to satisfy their needs, and this experience becomes more challenging. This is not the same Facebook or Twitter she glances through on her leisure time. These are cries for help about a broken device, an intrigue about an upcoming sale, or a complaint about a delayed flight. Her job as a designer for SCS is to arm support agents with the tools necessary to help these customers, and fast, without losing their minds.
Designing for the Service industry takes the same amount of UX chops as any other. You have to understand your users and their goals and pain points. Service agents must act quickly and multi-task between conversations. The massive amount of incoming social posts is enough to overwhelm even a seasoned agent. Many agents rely on the Salesforce Service Console to organize the SCS chaos.
The Console highlights key information about the customer, case, and product history so the agent can focus on solving issues rather than sifting through noise (see below). An agent can quickly switch between multiple cases (1) with each case title at the top (2) for context. In one view, an agent can see a customer’s account and product information (3), the social post itself and any notes in the case feed (6), and a customer’s social profile (e.g., number of followers, tweets, persona history) in the social sidebar (5). Once the agent has the full context of the customer and issue, s/he can respond directly on social channels in the Social Publisher (4). In the Utility Bar (7), Omni-Channel automatically routes cases to agents enabling them to respond to several customers simultaneously. The key driver in the layout is efficiency — capturing all of the needed information and ability to respond on one screen.
As a millennial, Kristen loves designing for SCS. She learns more about trending social networks than she would on her free time.
“I get paid to play with chat bots and I’m rewarded by the challenge of turning overwhelmed agents into customer superheroes.”
— Kristen Muramoto, Senior Product Designer, Service Cloud
What’s next?
We shared these with customers at Dreamforce 2016, who were extremely eager to learn best practice. We are now working with our customers to implement these practices and measure changes in their success metrics (e.g., customer satisfaction, Average Handle Time). One of the missions of the UX team is not just to inform our own work but to share our insights with our customers so that they can benefit directly as well. You can learn more by checking out our podcast interview.
It’s your turn to Get Social
As a customer, what do you love and hate about SCS? If you provide SCS, what has worked for you? What questions do you still have? Tell us what you think and we promise to respond!
This post was written in collaboration with Kristen Muramoto and based on the research by Demi Boe. Thank you Raymon Sutedjo-The and Ian Schoen for all of your feedback!
Follow us at @SalesforceUX.
Want to work with us? Contact uxcareers@salesforce.com
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