To provide effective social customer service, you need to be fast. But with an increasing number of social platforms and customers using social media as a support channel, many businesses are struggling to keep up. Even businesses with dedicated social customer service teams need a way to efficiently wade through all the comments and questions.
What's more, metrics become increasingly important as teams strive to streamlines and optimize their processes. But you need the right metrics.
Here are five social customer service performance indicators you should be tracking daily:
1. Social Activity Per Hour
To better understand your workload, track social activity broken down by the hour. Keeping an eye on this information on a daily basis allows you to identify traffic patterns and prepare for spikes in engagement.
Having this information on hand also allows you to staff your teams strategically so you have coverage during high-traffic times. In some cases, you might discover that the majority of social traffic takes place outside of normal business hours, which could require adding additional shifts or even staffing a care team in another time zone.
2. Response Rates
Keep tabs on how quickly your team is able to respond to customer feedback that requires a response. Track average response times by the day of the week and time of day so you can better pinpoint if and when response times are falling short of your goals. Should you notice that lags in response time correspond to a certain time or day, make sure to adjust staffing accordingly.
You will also need to track average time to first action. Some customer inquiries are more complicated than others, which means your social customer service team might need more time than usual to respond to certain requests. That’s OK. Just make sure that they can provide an initial response (i.e. we’re checking into the situation) within your goal time frame.
3. Engagement with Unique Users
Track the number of times your company is mentioned each day and break that number down into unique mentions. Doing so gives you, your team, and your company a better understanding of the impact of social customer service and the reach of your brands. Pay special attention to unique mentions and track the engagement your team has with this particular subset, as it illustrates the importance of social customer service in maintaining and building relationships with customers. These are numbers you'll want to report on regularly.
4. Customer Sentiment
Understanding customer sentiment is not only a key performance indicator, but it can also provide actionable insight. Keep an eye on incoming brand mentions at all times and measure sentiment, not just at a high level, but in the specific areas that matter to your business. For example, a hotel should measure sentiment for areas like ease of booking, check-in, room comfort, and food, while a consumer packaged goods manufacturer would measure sentiment for product quality, the purchase process, price, and offers.
5. Total Mentions With Actions
Similarly, track all brand mentions that require actions. The best way to do this is by setting up separate feeds populated with customer mentions flagged as requiring a response. With a queue of mentions that require action, your team will be able to chip away at responses without missing a single customer.
Start by tracking these five key performance indicators and add to the list of tracked data based on the unique needs and goals of your business. As the list of priority data grows, you might want to consider housing pertinent social customer service data in a dashboard. But no matter how you choose to organize your performance indicators, your social customer service team will be equipped with the insight and tools they need to provide the best possible customer experience.
Susan Ganeshan is chief marketing officer at Clarabridge.