Social customer service is not just for big brands. If your customers are on social media you need to be ready to assist and support them. Learn about the seven most common social customer service pain points and how to fix them.

1. …and how to resolve them
common social customer
service pain points
7

2. Social media is not just for big brands.
It is a channel of choice for consumers who
want fast and efficient customer service.

3. If your customers are on social media you
need to be there to support them.
Here are 7 common pain points you are likely
to come across and some practical advice for
resolving them.

4. Pain point #1
Customers expect fast
response times

5. %
of consumers expect
a response on social
media within 15
minutes (BT, Avaya)

6. If you aren’t set up to
respond quickly you risk
losing loyal customers

7. Resolution
• Consolidate your social channels into a single app where agents have a single
stream view of incoming messages and comments and can more easily prioritise
when volumes are high.
• Make sure you monitoring outside of @handles. If you don’t know about a
comment it will never be answered.

8. • Use smart automations
to filter out noise and
make it easier for
agents to quickly work
through the messages.
• Last agent routing –
enables customers to
talk to the same agent if
they need to revisit an
issue, and saves them
having to repeat the
same information over
and over.

9. Pain point #2
Adapting to the rapid pace
of change

10. The age of social
customer service
means continued
change and
innovation.
New channels are
constantly appearing
and it can be
challenge to stay on
top.

11. This change
creates an
opportunity for
your brand to
engage with
consumers in-
the-moment
and create
meaningful
interactions
which build
brand loyalty
and trust.

12. Resolution
• Future-proof your social customer service strategy – invest in
scalable technology which can cope with increases in volume
and new channels
• Listen out for mentions and tags about your company to
understand more about how your customers and prospects
view your brand
• Ask your customers for feedback. The Twitter CSAT survey
enables businesses to ask for feedback after an interaction to
gauge their performance and identify any key new trends.

13. Pain point #3
The need to reduce the
cost to serve

14. Every business wants to minimise costs and moving customers from
more expensive contact points will help you deliver cost savings.

15. But, to encourage more
customers to use cheaper
social channels you need to
give them confidence that it will
be quick and easy to get an
answer.

16. Resolution
• Call deflection: Think
about using post
interaction surveys to
simply ask customers if
they would have used
voice, chat or email
instead of social.
• You can add these to
metrics on changing
volumes on other more
expensive channels as
more customers migrate
to social.

17. • Flush rate: Analyse posts
which do not require a
response or action to work
out how you reduce the
number of inbound
comments in the first place.
• Being able to route the right
types of mentions to the
right team will give you a
head start.

18. • Agent activity reports:
• A supervisor dashboard in your engagement app to monitor and
measure agent activity will help you drive down costs by optimising
productivity and efficiently resourcing services.

19. Pain point #4
How to integrate social
with existing customer
service channels

20. Is your current technology is fit for purpose to
deliver digital customer service?
%
of contact centres do
not think their
existing technology is
future proof

21. If you have a help desk tool, some
will have the ability to add social
channels
…but it’s a balancing act as to
whether you’ll be able to have all the
capabilities you need.

22. Resolution
Here are some questions to think about when assessing whether
current technology can be modified.
• Do you have the capability to route comments to a specific
agent based on workflow criteria?
• Help desk tools tend to route comments to the next agent
regardless of relevance.
• Without sufficient automations to route mentions, you can end
up with missed complaints on your main brand account, and
marketing and sales enquiries going to your support account
and wasting agent time.

23. • Can support teams access
conversation histories to inform
replies? Many tools pick up a
mention, then send you to Facebook
(or the relevant platform) to reply,
this means there is no customer
history stored for future
engagement.
• Are you able to monitor
conversations beyond Facebook and
Twitter? For example, if you are a
retailer then you will need to
monitor and engage on Instagram.
The right platform will let you add all
these different social sites, and route
into one organised inbox.

24. Are you able to search for
indirect mentions on
Twitter? Help desk
software that doesn’t allow
you to search outside of
official handles will mean
you always miss a share
of the interactions
targeted at you.

25. Does marketing have an
oversight on messaging and
comments to protect
reputations?
An approvals feature will
enable replies to be sent to
designated supervisors for
approval prior to publishing.

26. Are customer service supervisors able
to analyse incoming conversations and
spot trends in customer behaviours?
This can be invaluable in identifying
ways to improve the customer
experience and fix small issues before
they become big problems.

27. Pain point #5
Building a successful
social customer care team

28. Training existing staff to
work across multiple
channels can be a
challenge. Your best
people on the phone may
not be good at writing
responses.
You will most likely need
to recruit new staff given
the specific skills needed
around multi-tasking and
complex problem solving.

29. Resolution
• Create a social media playbook and have clear guidelines on
what can be shared on an open channel and what needs to be
discussed in a private conversation.
• Have a clear policy on the triggers for when a comment needs
to be escalated and guidelines on the distinction between an
issue and a crisis.
• Introduce a supervisor approval loop to help with training and
agent feedback, and to prevent anything inappropriate going
public, and potentially viral.

30. Pain point #6
Lack of visibility on social
data

31. Using many disparate systems makes it extremely difficult to
create a single view of your digital customers.
Your social customer service team cannot be truly efficient if they
do not monitor and analyse agent performance on social
channels.

32. You need to
measure
engagement to be
able to demonstrate
value alongside
traditional channels,
improve agent
performance, and
justify investment.

33. Resolution
• Implementing tagging for your social interactions will enable
administrators to report on the social conversations and identify
comment types. Use existing categories across your business, or
define specific tags just for social.
• Ensure your customer service app includes a supervisor dashboard
to give senior managers a real-time overview of agent engagement,
all in a single interface to benchmark KPIs.
• Use the analytics tool in your social customer service app to take a
deep dive into customer conversations to understand what drives
customer satisfaction, complaints, motivations and behaviours.
• Assimilate insight from customer interactions to identify any areas
where you are not delivering a consistent experience. People often
turn to social to complain about how they have been treated by staff
elsewhere in your business.

34. Pain point #7
Demonstrating social ROI

35. Lots of brands are
starting to share how
social media
engagement has
driven higher sales
and there is an
opportunity to improve
customer acquisition,
loyalty, retention and
repeat business with
positive engagement.

36. The Institute of Customer Service, in its Service Goes Social
report, found there was an upside to increased consumer
appetites for social engagement.
It found that 39% of people who used social actively gave
feedback, while 31% made pre-sales enquiries.

37. Resolution
• Empower your support teams to identify ‘sales’ opportunities.
• Use the analytics tool in your social customer service app to
build search queries, or use automations, based on specific
keywords around buying questions or buying signals, to route
potential leads to the right teams.

38. • Benchmark the sentiment
shifts of customer messages
over time. Also calculate
sentiment conversion.
Customers will often start off
angry but effective
engagement and resolution
can turn a negative into a
positive.
• Track the number of
comments which are
resolved on first contact.
Tagging functionality in your
social customer service tool
will help you analyse these.

39. Delivering effective social
customer service is a powerful
way to differentiate your business
from competitors and build a loyal
customer base.
Learn more about how the
Sentiment app can help you
deliver outstanding customer care
on social media.

40. Thank You!
Need to relieve some of the pain of managing social customer service, or just want to make the service you
provide on social better? Get in touch to see how we can help.
Email: info@sentimentmetrics.com
Web: sentimentmetrics.com
Follow us: @smetrics