These figures show just how much customer service engagement has evolved over the past few years. It’s estimated that 90% of businesses will use social media as a primary customer service channel by 2020. There’s no doubt that companies need to adapt to the change to avoid being left behind. Here’s how we helped one of our clients embrace social media as a valuable customer engagement tool.

Our client is a household name in the interactive entertainment sector, and develops and publishes leading franchises worldwide. We’ve been working with them to help them expand their customer experience across designated social networks.

The client has their own community forums which are self-moderated by users. However, in order to respond to the ever-changing trends in customer engagement, they were looking to further develop customer support as part of the forums and, subsequently, introduce a structured method of moderation.

The client was also looking to establish social media customer support through a dedicated Twitter account.

To achieve these goals, there were a few challenges to overcome:

• The client had no previous experience of moderating or providing support through forums or Twitter.
• The client did not provide any guidelines, and we had to build all processes and procedures from the ground up.
• There were high levels of restrictions and confidentiality, due to the culture within the client’s company.
• The client was wary of creating a public presence due to previous negative experiences.
• There were unknown expectations of customer volume and behavior.

To ensure that we could implement the client’s social media engagement model despite those challenges, our approach covered the following 5 key areas:

Planning
We carried out extensive research to inform our approach to planning. Working in partnership with the client, we carried out detailed and organized structuring of processes and design.

Expectation Management
To help us drive the planning process, we established client expectations early on. Discussions were held around discernible goals, and the overall aims of the new processes.

Collaboration
The project called for collaborative efforts between departments, both internally and externally. We used knowledge from marketing, public relations and customer services to create deliverables that everyone could agree on.

Synergistic Relationship Development
We needed to create synergy in the relationship between the quality assurance team and the customer experience team, to help us develop a successful feedback loop for software and hardware performance issues to be addressed and prioritized.

Guidelines
We created guidelines for responses for distribution to the community forum, and the Twitter account. The guidelines included information on tone, lexicon, content and dialogue exchanges.

PTW guided the client into this new channel. The processes and plans were successfully put in place, resulting in increased support for customers and greater presence for the client.

The following tangible results demonstrate that social media is a powerful tool to engage customers, and can have tremendous business benefits:

Increased Presence
Twitter followers increased 58% year on year since launch. This also resulted in an increased reach of potential new customers for the client, with each Tweet seeing an average of 329 impressions. We also discovered an increase in customers aged 35-54 accessing support.

Multichannel Customer Support
By implementing this new channel, the client increased their customer offering. Customers now had a choice of how they could access support.

Self-Serve Opportunities
This channel gives customers the opportunity to self-serve by seeing what other customers are seeking to resolve or achieve. They can also view the outcomes, when establishing contact via the channel. Public dialogues and avoiding channel-hopping helps maintain positive C-SAT.

Streamlined Processes
The creation of effective community support processes helped streamline approaches which had been previously established by the clients' legal and public relation departments.

Faster Resolution
After PTW implemented the new Twitter channel, response time decreased by 50%.

Increased Quality
Quality Auditors review the community support responses. It is currently the highest quality scored support channel, with consistent scores of 95-100%.

Standardization
A dedicated community support team resulted in a standardized brand persona across all social support channels, giving customers a friendly and pleasant experience.

Exceeding Customers Expectations
Tweets are responded to within an average time of 7 minutes. This exceeds the expectations highlighted in research, which showed that 32% of customers expect a response in 30 minutes and 42% expect a response within an hour.