Tag Archives: employees

Building a world class social support system with minimal staff using decentralization & advocates

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With nearly one in two internet users on Facebook, hundreds of millions on twitter, forums, blogs, and niche networks social support isn’t just a great way to communicate with customers, it’s become an essential part of doing business and is nearly as expected as a phone number. But don’t worry about hiring on a whole new support team: with a creative approach, social support is more about using the benefits of the channel than investing millions — and that’s important as the flood gate of inquiries is near infinite.

Leverage the support resources you have, let reps get social

The only differences between a call and a tweet are length and visibility. The first is a simple learn, a few tools, guidelines and some practice. Visibility is more of a challenge and something that has to be thought through less you have rep’s tweet make the front page of tech crunch but fundamentally the people who already know the support business are right for the job.

Bring support to the product, sales & marketing teams for their expertise

Most questions are functional but the fun ones are deeper and sure to come up time and again. With customers expecting real answers, social support is a great way to bring the back of the business front and center enabling product teams to monitor, check in and throw an answer or two in the hat. Technology advances help put a stop on slip ups and save you from having to do a support training to the whole org… But twe all serve the customer so not only will they appreciate the expert response, it’s one heck of a way to insure corporate really gets the customer.

Get away from 9-5, get flexible

Customers aren’t tied to 9-5, a post can happen at any hour and a response is expected not in seconds but not days either. While this means throwing away the single shift approach, it also makes things fun for the support team… with no requirement to pay full attention to any one issue, no eyes on visibility, things get a lot more flexible… Multiple contacts, remote work, there’s a opt of opportunity to shake things up, get more people doing less hours and avoid the call center turnover as a result.

Invest in technology to standardize, track & measure responses

If there’s one area you do spend on it should be support management. Enterprise programs like CoTweet [my pick], Involver and Buddy Media not only provide a single interface to manage all your channels but with assignable items, escalations, customizable canned answers and even authorization levels, they’ve really made social support as easy to manage as traditional support, perhaps even more so with the added insights access to the user’s profiles give. Trying to go the free route is dangerous and leads to missed posts and double replies but you can always work your way up from cheaper to more powerful.

Develop community tools to foster user to user collaboration

As your support offering increases, so will the demand from customers who see that you’re on and don’t require a phone call to reach. While scaling your staff is part of the game, scaling your users is really the only way to keep up. This means putting together the right tools whether it’s a support community based on a form, integrated tweets to let users chime in with each other, or dedicated channels on third party networks, give people a way to do the lifting and they’ll not only chime in, but lend a lot of credibility to what’s said too.

Reward and foster peer support with advocacy rewards

Following those community tools you’ll find that there are never respond, occasionally respond and always respond types. Growing and keeping that third group is a big win to getting over to peer going so just as you target advocates who promote your brand, find those helping it and enable them with moderation tools, badges, and the occasional piece of swag. It just takes a little visibility to get them amped up and others following for their own shot at the same.

Educate your customers away from brand channels, over to better digital options

As your peer to peer network grows it’s important to get people off of brand channels and into the support systems. Through visible links, polite suggestions to existing faqs, tabs, profile tweaking and just about anything else you can link on but really it’s about training. Monitor the brand channel, respond with a support one… People learn and the noise for support starts to move away from the engagement areas, where it’s harmful and easy to lose track of, and over to the dedicated places where the answers are better anyways.

Turn the learnings into better product information, better products

Social support, or really support in general, comes full circle when you start addressing the root issues in your marketing, pre-sales education, and yes the product it’s self. Whether it’s through your social support system’s reporting, forum polls, or just keeping a pulse on trends and terms, it’s not hard to identify the top pain points – fix them.

Of course changes don’t come overnight but with a little upfront acknowledgement, FAQ explanations and member empowerment you’ll find customers are far more willing to tolerate a problem you’re on top of than one you keep cut & pasting the answer for.

Solid execution: Delta gets smacked by soldier’s viral video, responds & changes policy in hours

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So it’s only been a few hours since my post on Delta Airlines snafu with a group of soldier’s over baggage fees which turned into a viral / pr crises in just a few hours. Not only is the issue all over Twitter, Facebook and news sites but the video from the soldier’s has passed 200,000 views at last count.

So while my first post was really about empowering your ground-level employees to avoid bad customer experiences, whether they go viral or not, Delta has turned this into a great example of how you should handle social incidents.

While nothing can erase the negative impact this will leave, Delta’s social [and business] teams have been on their toes and acting quick to avoid making this into a “United Airlines Breaks Guitar” hit. Sure the PR will continue against them, more articles will come, it won’t be good but for an organization of this site and legacy, they’re playing their cards well. Let’s take a look…

  1. Yesterday a video was posted about an issue costing 38 soldiers $2800 in fees. As quick as the video became shared, Delta was in the mix with a response from “Rachel” apologizing & reaffirming the policy just before midnight EST.
  2. This morning Delta wakes up to see it’s full-blown-viral with major social network and media coverage creating over 200,000 YouTube views.
  3. By 1pm EST Rachel has an updated post with an updated policy: 4 checked bags for military traveling in economy on orders. The post reaffirms Delta’s involvement & programs for the military. And Rachel also threw in a personal statement as an Army wife and 12 year employee of Delta.

It’s been less than 24 hours and Delta has out two blog posts, has changed a world-wide policy and has allowed a personal message to float into the middle of it.

Like I said, this won’t end the problem and frankly, adjusting one policy does not fix the underlying issue where the system often prevents employee from making the “right” decision but Delta has taken a strong step to mitigating the issue and, more importantly, having a voice in the spread of it every step of the way.

By moving quickly blogs, tweets, mainstream media are all adjusting their story to mention Delta’s response and changes while the story is hot. As hard as it is, this is critical and very well executed by Delta… The longer you wait, the colder the issue and the less your response is seen so, from a social crises management perspective, kudos to their social team for being on top of the video, their business for being flexible enough to run and make a decision when one needed to be made — even if it’s just one gesture it’s a big one at the right time.

For more thoughts on crises communication management in a social world, check out my previous post about the Urban Outfitters social media incident.

Policy or not. Have you empowered your employees do to the right thing?

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This morning I caught a post on the Huffington Post about how a group of soldiers who had come from Afghanistan and just come off an 18 hour layover had been charged $2800 in excess baggage fees [including one guy's weapon case] by Delta Airlines. Writing this post now it’s grown to be the Huff Pro’s homepage and the YouTube video of the soldier’s interactions [yes, they filmed it] now has over 170,000 listed views. It’s a rough day to be in Delta’s PR room.

But this isn’t just about Delta. It’s about how we as “corporate” set policies that potentially lock thousands of our employees into a position where they are forced to do things that get our brand to the front page of major news outlets in a social media disaster.

Without a little trust and room for flexibility, your employees can become your enemies.

Now that’s not to say Delta was wrong here. As they’re social team said in their response [good job being upfront on this on Delta, apologizing and publishing your facts]: they’ve got an agreement and a policy and have to think about scale. Similarly, just because someone has a video camera or threatens to blog or tweet or cause you negative PR, that doesn’t mean you should bend the rules in the least. When I hear about PR or Social activity as a threat my reaction is always to follow the letter of the rule… but what if the rule is bad? What if the video camera isn’t a threat but capturing a policy that reflects a brand who doesn’t get it? Can your employees act to do the right thing?

Airlines are an easy example because things so often go wrong, both in and out of their control. Rough for their social media managers, good for blogging on.

I can recall one instance where a flight I was going to take was clearly going to be rerouted [the airline we were going too closes at 11pm night, at 10 we hadn’t taken off]. When I suggested they call the shuttles in advance, the response was a very friendly, very polite: we’re not allowed… The rest of the line was irrelevant: good, smart employees without power may as well be replaced with… well kiosks.

This doesn’t end with bending rules either. How about creation? Just last night I was talking with a good friend about his job managing a profitable store in the retail service sector and what digital could do for them. Here you have a smart, dedicated manager looking push his brand forward and yet he’s afraid that growing the business will actually hurt him. Again there’s nothing wrong with corporate setting digital or social policies, running programs and centralizing – that’s a good thing. But when the supervising store manager has been given no social program, no idea who to contact about one and is fearful of just trying things, you’re losing opportunity.

We’ve all got bottom lines and scale to think about but sometimes the decision made at 30,000 feet doesn’t reflect what’s necessary right on the ground. Sometimes the desire to get all of the experts in a room and talk over the corporate strategy is stifling the local branch that is ready to act now and doesn’t know if they can.

It boils down to simple thing: trust. We ask a lot of our employees but don’t want to trust them with discretion and whether it’s the frontpage of one of the world’s largest news outlets or just an upset customer who tells their 135 Facebook friends, a lack of latitude can go a long way in hurting business.