The quality of social media customer service is ultimately determined by how customers experience the service level provided by the employees. In order to keep the service quality optimal, it’s absolutely necessary to use a structured process. Our social media customer service management process consists of 6 steps.
1. Monitor
The specialists of Digital Customer Care Company monitor real-time (and not just a few times a day) how your brand is mentioned and discussed. By reading all messages, we listen to what your customers say online about your organization, brand, employees, or products. We do this with the help of advanced custom-made software, which enables us to see what’s currently being said about your company.
2. Assess
We assess the incoming mentions and discussions based on content (what exactly is the question, complaint, problem, or comment about), and on the degree of influence of the source or person who posted the message. Based on the social media customer service policy guidelines that we agreed on with you as a customer, we make choices about which messages we do and don’t respond to, and we determine which messages receive the highest priority.
3. Respond
We respond to messages within 5 minutes, so that the sender of the message (and the social community following the discussion) knows that we’ve received his message. Ideally, we come up with the answer and/or the solution. If we can’t, we’ll report that we will come up with a substantive response, for example within 24 hours, depending on the agreement we make together. We do this with messages received via social media, but also via Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.
4. Retrieve information
The Digital Customer Care Company team often acts as the 1st line of customer service and is (in larger organizations) in close contact with our client’s 2nd line customer service team. If there are questions or problems that require information from the customer organization, we pass the issue on to the 2nd line. After that, the issue is often presented to other departments such as product management, PR, or sales. In somewhat smaller companies without their own customer service, the Digital Customer Care Company team is in direct contact with fixed points of contact within the various departments.
5. Answer
As soon as we have sufficient information to be able to provide a substantive response, we will answer the customer’s question or complaint via the channel chosen by him/her. As a rule, we don’t try to handle complaints via social media publicly, but via a personal message 1-on-1 with the customer.
6. Document
All communication regarding current and processed social media customer service issues with both the internal organization and the customer is documented in a management system. This creates a knowledge database that we can use for future issues