Startup Central — Prepping your 2020 CX Life featuring Freshly
Want to see the full discussion? See the video of their talk here.
Customer engagement doesn’t happen in a vacuum. From social media to reputation management, the Online Engagement Team at Freshly works hard to ensure that CX is delivered at every touch-point.
In our latest Startup Central Virtual Meetup, we asked Vice President of Customer Experience Colin Crowley, Online Engagement Manager Megan Merrick, and Associate Director of Infrastructural Efficiency Ben Segal to share with us insights and learnings from their experience.
Creating a CX presence on social
When Ben first started at Freshly in late 2016, they hadn’t quite ironed out the details of managing contacts on social media. “Just a quick Like and move on from it was good enough,” he says. The team hadn’t yet determined a voice for engaging with potential and existing customers on the varying platforms.
“If your customers are talking on social media, you can choose to be there and engage with them, or you can choose to ignore it. There’s no middle ground.”
— Megan Merrick, Online Engagement Manager
Customers generate all kinds of online touch-points, from reviewing and rating businesses on sites like Yelp or the Better Business Bureau to taking their questions and complaints to social media — sometimes in response to outbound marketing. Your business will want to monitor these situations as they arise, whether they’re positive or negative.
“You definitely want your audience to lead that conversation online,” says Megan. “But we want to guide it with a CX presence.”
But to develop a crack-response team, you have to have a strong working relationship between CX and marketing. “You’ll have to figure out together which part of social media CX owns,” says Megan.
For her team, they own the engagement and interaction on any social media and review site, but don’t own the posting and growth — that remains with marketing.
From Top to Bottom:
Megan Merrick, Stephen Delatoba, Cristin Dora, Jamie Ubaldo, Nick Hernandez, Eli Maldonado, Renzo Dizon, Cristine Corig, Jazz Orencio, Kylie Mendoza, Devie Celestial, Gretchen Ibanez, Nash Manalao, April Morales
This CX expansion into social media meant big wins. First, says Colin, it allows people in the CX world to be on top of what’s going on in marketing and PR. In addition, the collaboration provides a holistic view of the CX across channels, ensuring that Freshly doesn’t deliver different levels of service across channels.
“We don’t just parcel some of the responsibilities for different channels to different people in the organization,” says Colin. “Rather we have a team of people who can own that, who can make sure that those channels are given the same level of dedication as the others.”
The second win, says Colin, is that both the CX and marketing teams were called out on Instagram Business as an example of great customer engagement online. This really speaks to how important it is for those two teams to be aligned and on the same page, and how much of the social media world is a shared space between customer service and marketing.
“If you do that well you can really create a great seamless experience for customers online,”
— Colin Crowley
The third and final win? CX presence on these channels helps break down the barriers of communication. By giving CX a place at the table, the marketing team is able to more clearly communicate the brand image for the company to the CX teams, who can then communicate that to front-line agents.
Factoring social media into the holistic customer experience
When Freshly started, their social contacts were separate from phone chat and email contacts. This created one big hurdle: identifying who the customer is. “They might be using a handle or their name,” says Megan. And so the team began identifying customers based on their unique problem, and tagging social media profiles with their email address and phone number using Conversocial, later adding it to their main database. This facilitated a smooth transition from front-line agents handling chat and phone lines to front-line agents handling social media.
As an added strategy, Freshly utilizes Slack channels and Google Forms to enable Front-line agents to alert the social media team whenever a customer mentions they’re going to share experience on social media or a review site. Says Megan, “This lets us mitigate a situation or be their champion, if they’re really enjoying Freshly.”
According to Colin, the strategy paid off. Response times are now approximately 20 minutes across social media channels, which is comparable to phone and email support. The team now proactively engages with customers, rather than being purely reactive.
Social Response Time
Making a universal QA Program for Social
Creating a QA process for social media was no easy task. The team started by creating a digestible rubric, measuring the agent on whether they were “show-ready,” IE. utilizing the chatty tone of voice, representing the brand well, or creating “wow” or potentially viral moments. To actively measure progress throughout an agent’s training, the team pulled 10% of their daily messages for leaders to review and give feedback — editing, rejecting, or approving before being published. This was a great way for new agents to take risks, and get feedback in the moment in addition to weekly QA tickets.
This enabled the team to grow globally, expanding abroad in the Philippines for 24/7 coverage. “We wouldn’t have the confidence to expand into social and other areas without this robust QA team, to act as a training tool in on-boarding everyone,” says Colin.
As an added bonus, QA scores have gone from approximately 90% to 97%. On social media, CSAT scores have also increased to upwards of 85%. “This is no small achievement when you consider that industry average CSAT for social channels is closer to 75%,” says Colin.
