Social Customer Service Metrics improve your business
What I love most about getting to focus the majority of my work on social customer service is that there are actually ways to measure that you're making a difference to the bottom line. First let's distinguish between two type of numbers.social customer service
Vanity metrics. Numbers that look good on a chart when they're trending upward but really don't prove a lot on their own (followers, likes, members, comments, retweets, etc.)
Value metrics. Numbers that may use vanity metrics as part of larger formula and produce a measure that shows you're moving the needle on something your VP cares about. Think decreasing transaction costs, increasing agent efficiency or increasing NPS.
I know all of you who are currently only reporting on vanity metrics are now are now standing up and yelling, "Damn straight, we want value metrics!" Here are a few ideas:
Transaction costs. This is a pretty straightforward formula. What you're really figuring out is the cost of servicing a customer viaTwitter vs. telephone.
Determine the cost of a call.
Determine the cost of a tweet.
Determine what % of Twitter transactions would have been painful enough to warrant the customer actually calling? (I wouldn't presume every tweet would have been a call).
Derive your "estimated" cost savings per month.
Then do the same for Facebook, and generate the average transaction of servicing over social media.
Finally, get someone credible in the organization to reality-check your calculation.
Agent efficiency. This formula can range from simple to complex, depending on how air-tight you want to make your story. Some standard call centre metrics are fine to start off with. Time to Respond (TTR) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) will work. Take a look at what these metrics look like for you traditional channels vs. social over a period of time and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Social is designed to be the fastest service channel on the planet. Oh right, if you aren't piping your serviceable issues from social media into a case management tool that can report on these metrics, it will be much harder to do this.
Customer satisfaction. So now you've proved that you can service customers faster AND cheaper, but are customers happy with the service? Let's find out. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a pretty standard CSAT metric these days. My experience tells me that when you start to measure this you'll be hated by the rest of the call centre managers because your score for social will be so much higher. The way I'll describe it is just for Twitter and is a little manual but I think it's a good place to start and get a bit of a baseline. Here's how it works.
Each week, grab a certain number of Twitter handles from customers that you serviced within the last week. The more the better; not everyone will respond.
DM them and ask the NPS question in a fun way. "How did we do? On a scale of 1-10 would you recommend our service to your pals?"
Throw all the responses into a spreadsheet and calculate your Twitter NPS. Do the Snoopy dance.
Book a meeting with the VP to let him or her know how much higher the call centre NPS is now that you've averaged your score into it.
Some of the more robust listening tools try to calculate NPS using their sentiment engine but it never hurts to ask people directly too.
So there you have it, a few ways to measure the actual value of your social customer service in a way in which your VP will take you seriously instead of staring at your report and asking, "What's a retweet?" - 3 Social Customer Service Metrics that will Make You a Rock Star
{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}