Social customer care: There’s a number for all seasons

I was thinking about the power of numbers yesterday as I scanned the tweets and RTs that appeared under the hashtag #custserv. This got me thinking about what other numbers exist out there.

• 58% of customers who took their complaint to Facebook or Twitter expected a response
• Huge cost savings with social customer care – 90%+ savings
• Customer services as such was the main social media objective for only 1.2% of marketers surveyed
• 68% of ur customers who leave do so cuz they perceive u r indifferent to them
• Repeat customers spend 33% more than new ones
• 7 out of 100 URLs accessed by businesses were directed to Facebook and 10% of Internet bandwidth went to YouTube
• Staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year
• A negative customer review on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook can cost a company about 30 customers
• Only 3% of consumers believe that UK high street retailers offer great customer service!
• 60–75% of customers will do business with a company again if it deals with a customer service issue fairly, even if the result is not in their favour
• 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8% of their customers agree
• 73% of consumers end a relationship due to poor service
• 74% customers would be prepared to pay more for a product if it came with better service
• More than 50% of UK customers will spend more on products and services if the service experience was guaranteed to be first class
• On average, UK consumers will pay a premium of 7% for the privilege of good customer service and 70 per cent state they would do more business with an organisation that offered decent customer care
• 25% of UK holidaymakers check things out on TripAdvisor before they book their holiday
• Poor customer service is costing UK businesses £15.3 BILLION
• 49% of customers see personal recommendations from friends, family or colleagues as the most trustworthy source of information
• 42% expecting their response in less than a day (via Twitter or Facebook)

These numbers like the tweets themselves are freely available, and often begin to take on a life of their own; particularly now with the ability to RT information.

We use numbers to support whatever point we are trying to make. And whatever number you want to back up whatever argument you want to make, it exists out there somewhere. And if the number comes attached to a known brand name or attributed to a known analyst even better.

But how often do we really think about the numbers we use, what they mean or the original context they appeared in? We seem to trust these numbers that exist in the open information economy implicitly. We become blinded by them: the bigger the number the more believable it seems to be.

And often, we need the numbers right now to back up an argument or a point of view. It’s always right now.

But what is the implication of this lack of rigour that right now brings? How often do we read the footnotes and explanations that accompany how these numbers came about; if they even exist?

How many business decisions have been made on the basis of these numbers?

Social media customer service: Eureka – the ultimate social media customer service metric!

I was at the European Customer Experience World conference in London a few months back talking with @janeyfranklin about social media metrics from a company perspective (what do I know about metrics?!). But as I was reflecting on the event with her I suddenly had one of those eureka moments. It came to me – the universal social media customer service metric. I’ll share it with you, and just you, so don’t tell anyone else. Anyway, without further ado, here it is.

Number of followers x Number of tweets per day x Number of calls per day x Number of emails per day x Number of calls received via IVR x Number of followers following Stephen Fry (if USA – replace with Ashton Kutcher) x Number of daily RTs x Number of repeat calls x Number of call centre agents x Number of agents handling social media x Time to respond to Tweets x Emails answered within SLA x Calls answered within SLA x Number of angry customers per day via phone x Number of abusive Tweets per day x Average number of calls dropped per day x Average number of emails left unanswered at the end of each day per day x Average number of total contacts received per day x Average number of total issues resolved per day x Average number of total issues unresolved per day x Number of complaints found on Four Square x Number of complaints found on TripAdvisor x Number of complaints resolved on FourSquare and TripAdvisor x Number of comments on Facebook customer support x Number of customers who blog about you x Number of people who help answer your customers’ queries x Total customer service agent minutes lost to restroom breaks per day x Total number of YouTube views per day x Total number of blog comments per week by customers x Total number of internal calls made to find the right person to answer your customer’s questions x Total number of positive feedback you receive per day (This is weighted because positive feedback must be worth more than negative feedback, so award yourself another 37 points for each positive comment) divided by Cost of an average cup of your favourite coffee from Costa Coffee (USA readers can replace this with Uncle Peet’s)

So there you have it! It’s taken awhile, but I know it’s been worth the wait for you. So if anyone ever tells you that you can’t measure the ROI of delivering customer service through social media, then tell them not any more.

Oh and by the way, the secret to this formula is knowing what you want to measure before you actually start. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and coffee…

The paranoia of measuring everything and nothing

Following on from a conversation I had with a friend from a major telco recently, I started thinking about how we use metrics.

We often measure specific instances of customer behaviour without trying to relate it to an end-to-end journey. Perhaps this is a reflection of how businesses have traditionally operated – in silos?

I work in the ecommerce team therefore I measure sales, I work in the customer services team therefore I measure first contact resolution, I work in the marketing team therefore I measure email campaign open rates,  I work in the business operations team therefore I measure everything…

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But from a customer’s perspective the end-to-end journey might look like this: I want to buy a smartphone.

Monday: research it online via a company’s web site and whilst on there do an online chat about some products and tariffs, do a search on Twitter to see what people are saying about different smartphones

Tuesday: have a look at some handsets in store, talk to the sales agent about some choices, speak to my friends about what they’ve got

Wednesday: I’m not in any desperate hurry to get it, and I’ve heard that going via Twitter gets me a better price. I tweet to a specific telco about the phone I want and the tariff I am interested in. I get put on a callback list.

Thursday: Finally speak to someone from the telco about it. Try not to sound desperate, and slightly regret not going straight into the store. Desperation goes as I get a really good deal for going via Twitter. And the person I speak to over the phone is fantastic.

Friday: Desperation rises once again, as I realise it’s coming into the weekend and I won’t get the phone delivered until the following week. Go onto YouTube to see if there’s anything about the phone to try to pass the time. Find some unboxing videos. Feel slightly sad and geekish that I have resorted to an unboxing video. But think that wouldn’t it be great if a company sent me a ‘while you’re waiting’ email with unboxing videos in and other info related to my new handset.

Monday: Phone finally arrives…

Wednesday: Something is wrong with the phone and ring customer service after eventually finding the number online. Self service has much to answer for I think to myself! Go into a store to return the phone…

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How does a company measure that journey? Where does the journey start and end? Does it try to measure that? Can it even measure it? If it does, what does it do with that information?

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As customers, we seek information, purchase products, communicate with friends in an increasingly disjointed and fragmented cross-channel environment (online, offline, mobile). We instinctively switch between different platforms that are familiar to us, and sometimes experiment and subsequently assimilate those platforms that are less familiar to us.

As companies, we constantly try to understand, pre-empt, predict customer behaviour through metrics. We constantly play ‘customer catch-up’.

Do companies need to find new, different or innovative ways to look at measurement that not only brings departments together, but also works on different levels. How do I not only measure how many products were returned in a particular week, but the sentiment of the customers when they returned them, how many of those customers might be influencers or serial complainers, was there any impact on the NPS score, how did this relate to calls, emails, Tweets into the contact centre…

Do we need to bring marketing, insight, customer service, sales together? Customers touch on every part of an organisation.

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Are we driven by the paranoia of being supposedly able to measure everything? I don’t need to measure everything, and yet I need to capture everything, just in case. Just in case of what? Are we trying to overcomplicate what we measure? Do we know what it is we want to measure? Do we know what we want to do with the information once we’ve got it?

We measure first time resolution? Why? A customer isn’t interested in first time resolution. They’re interested in getting their problem fixed. Fantastic if it does get fixed first time, but if it doesn’t, that’s okay too, as long as you keep me informed. What effective measurements have you got in place to show whether this is happening or not?

For me it’s about getting the basics right for the customer, and measuring that. For a business it’s about something else entirely – ROI perhaps. Seems like we’re at an impasse from the outset. How do you measure the cost of that?