How to Manage Your Social Customer Service Operation this Christmas

Radhika Sivadi

3 min read ·

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As we hear time and again, predicting volumes of content over Christmas is never an exact science. However the one thing we do know is that they will be bigger than normal. With this in mind, I have put a few key pointers down to ensure you are outperforming the rest:

Get to the point:

Sort out what is important for your organization to respond to, with 50% of messages on social needing agent attention, sifting the wheat from the chaff for your agents is important:

Tips:

  • Learn from last years content: putting your content from last year into a word cloud generator will give you the most used words to search from.
  • Understand the context quickly: customers are having a conversation with you on social media, ensure the responder is able to see the entire conversation for quick context.
  • Prioritize key customer issues: this will ensure your response time is as low as possible.

Talking is the best way:

Social is no longer the property of one department, stakeholders from marketing, insight and service, to name a few, need to see what is going on. Communication is key here:

Tips:

  • Liaise with the marketing team to get a view of key posts and updates. A view of the content calendar is the ideal. This will let you know when to resource for busier times.
  • Share your pains: use tags to group messages and back this up with handling times to provide an accurate insight into the issues you are facing.
  • Use resource from the insight team to pull out key metrics, automatically.

Play to your strengths:

With the massive increase in contact center staff through the festive period, it is worth focusing any new recruits to the team on specific issues. This way they can be trained on brand response across any social channel.

Tips:

  • Separate conversations into issue type, based on your tags, using rules.
  • Set up you rules to ensure messages are directed to the best agent to resolve these and are pre-tagged so they do this as quickly as possible.
  • Train seasonal workers on specific functions and put them to work on this.
  • Adopt a play system to ensure agent efficiency and set up the system to ensure they are handled by the same agent for continuity.

Ride the rollercoaster:

Once the content is separated you are far easier able to see spikes and issues and move resource to them instantly.

Tips:

  • Monitor the channels to see which teams areas are getting the most content.
  • Manage the team using real time dashboard to ensure your team are as efficient as possible.
  • Use the permissions structure to ensure agents are assigned to the relevant teams for their roles.

Promote the good:

Report back some great stories and example to the company. When these are shown make sure people know they are happening.

Tips:

  • Show examples of great stories by having a specific tag and training the agents on what you are looking for.
  • Have competitions within the team to engage customers on specific posts.
  • Produce regular updates to the business to show how you are getting on and the volumes of conversation you are dealing with, using the analytics.

Go the extra mile:

Help your customers when they are asking for it and promote good deeds with the team. Christmas is stressful enough so help your customers out and they will be sure to share their experience with their followers.

Tips:

  • Where conversations warrant further actions, sending small gifts, joke presents etc. then encourage the team to do this;
  • Train the team on what the stories the brand are engaging with to help on this.
  • Also train the team to share any content which is great for the brand. It can help to share this with the marketing or PR departments so they can take this on.

These are just a few tips and tricks to help you have a successful Christmas. If you want to hear more leave us a comment.

This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How to Manage Your Social Customer Service Operation this Christmas

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Radhika Sivadi