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Metrics for Measuring Your Company's Social Care Efforts

by Walter Van Norden, Marketing Director, TELUS International - December 31, 2014

Metrics for Measuring Your Company’s Social Care Efforts 
 By Walter Van Norden, Marketing Director, TELUS International

Social care, which is customer care provided across social media channels, is becoming an increasingly significant part of daily operations. Organizations are at different stages of maturity in their social care programs: some are only listening to customers to improve marketing, product development and support, while others regularly engage with customers to reduce contact in other support channels and to provide exceptional real-time service.

Social care offers a tremendous new customer service opportunity and businesses that engage are really seeing the benefits. After implementing a social care plan, companies will need to develop a plan for measuring the results of their social care efforts. That’s why TELUS International, in partnership with Kenna Inc. and Oracle Corporation, has released a whitepaper evaluating which metrics to use to ensure social care programs meet business objectives.

The purpose of a metrics framework is to ensure that a social customer care program is achieving its objectives. Metrics should also ensure personnel are achieving their potential and that operations are efficient.

Finding the Right Metrics

Traditional social media metrics, such as “likes” and “follows,” are good for measuring top-of-the-funnel activities but will not necessarily correlate to a successful social care program grounded in business goals. Tools to measure the effectiveness of a social care program are important for several reasons:

Understanding economic impact. With social media’s prevalence, it is extremely important to track its economic impact on your brand. Metrics such as reach, loyalty and conversion rate help measure how much more business value is gained through social care interactions and how much brand equity is built through positive interactions.

Filtering and prioritizing posts for agents. With a limited number of contact center resources, it becomes increasingly important to determine which posts require a response. Effectiveness metrics such as influence and a brand evangelist index can help prioritize posts. For instance, a new post from a recognized brand evangelist with 10,000 followers should receive priority.

Routing the right post to the right agent. In most contact centers, agents are assigned to queues by skill sets. One group may specialize in complaints and another group may specialize in converting sales. Sentiment analysis, or keyword filtering, helps determine which posts need to be routed to which group.

There are many key performance indicators (KPIs) that can assess your team’s social care efforts; you need to decide which metrics add the most value to your business. The three main categories to choose from include:

1. Service measures
2. Quality measures
3. Effectiveness measures

Service Measures

Service measures calculate performance relative to demand. For example, demand can be measured by:
• The ‘listening volume’, which measures the total number of posts in a given time
• The ‘service level’ which calculates the percentage of incoming posts that an agent answers in a given time

‘Service level’ is one of the more important indicators of success for social care platforms. An industry best practice is to measure service level every half-hour and report it as a weighted average over the entire day. If this is too much, then companies should find a feasible increment of time for measuring service metrics and move towards the ultimate goal of measuring in half-hour increments.

To measure demand, contact centers should also calculate the ‘abandon rate’ by measuring the percentage of posts that are never responded to or looked at by the social media team. A significant ‘abandon rate’ means the volume is too high for agents to handle and usually occurs after an issue or big event. It’s worth monitoring this metric to ensure you have enough staff to satisfactorily respond to enquiries that need a response.

Quality Measures

Measuring the quality of social care responses is complex. However, KPIs that measure quality are valuable, providing an indication of how well social interactions are handled as a whole.

For example, you can measure quality by:
• Evaluating the written ‘quality of response’ given by an agent. This should be evaluated using a customer survey
• Calculating the ‘first post resolution’. If an issue is addressed on the first response then the advice given was clear and on point. Agents must be competent to write concise answers on a broad range of customer issues

Quality measures should also include an evaluation of the number of ‘channel redirections’ that occur. Channel redirection occurs when a customer asks a question on a channel that is not able to support an appropriate response. For example, on Twitter an agent can only respond in 140 characters so the customer may be asked to move the conversation to another channel to receive a more comprehensive response.

Used effectively, channel redirection ensures customer questions are answered efficiently. However it can make measurement tricky because issues may arise in one channel and be resolved in another – and the technical solutions to these measurement concerns are still evolving.

Effectiveness Measures

Effectiveness measures provide contact center managers with evidence of how social care conversations affect the overall perception of the brand. Depending upon your business, you may wish to measure the following:

• ‘Post sentiment’ to judge the attitude, opinion or emotion communicated through customers’ social posts
• ‘Brand Evangelist Index’ to calculate how likely a customer is to evangelize your brand on social networks. The most satisfied customers are more likely to be brand evangelists
• ‘Reach’ of the agent’s response by calculating the number of people who are following (for Twitter) or are friends with (for Facebook) the individual that’s having a public conversation with an agent

These metrics are important because they ensure you’re responding quickly to individuals that are influential in the social media sphere.

Summary

Measuring the impact of social care needn’t be a challenge: you simply have to determine which metrics best reflect your business priorities. A combination of service, quality, and effectiveness measures will help your business makes the most of its social care interactions.

For further information, please download the white paper, entitled ‘Measuring Social Media in the Contact Center, Metrics & ROI’ here.

Author: Walter Van Norden
Walter Van Norden is director of marketing for TELUS International – a provider of customer care and contact center outsourcing solutions to global clients. TELUS International is the global arm of TELUS, a national telecommunications company in Canada with $10.5 billion in annual revenue and almost 13 million customer connections. Learn more at: telusinternational.com




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