If you want to provide effective social customer service, you need to be prompt. However, with a growing number of social platforms as well as customers using social media as a support channel, many businesses are finding it difficult to keep up.
Even businesses with dedicated social customer service teams are looking for ways to efficiently go through all the comments and questions directed at them via various social media channels.
As teams try hard to streamline and optimize their processes, choosing the right metrics and tracking them regularly becomes increasingly important. Here are five key social customer service performance indicators, every business should be tracking daily:
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Social Activity per Hour
If you track social activity broken down by the hour, it will help you better understand your workload. Keeping track of this information on a daily basis will allow you to recognize traffic patterns and prepare for spikes in interactions.
Knowing the social activity per hour also allows a business to staff their team strategically, so that optimum coverage during high traffic, times can be forecasted. There are times when social traffic takes place beyond usual business hours.
Tracking this metric will help businesses prepare for those times, by creating additional shifts or hiring a support team in another time zone.
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Response Rates
It is beneficial to know how quickly your team is able to respond to customer queries and/or feedback that require a response. It will help you track average response times by the day of the week and time of the day.
This will help you find out if and when the response times are falling short of your goals; if it happens during a particular time of the day, and you need to adjust your staffing levels.
Apart from this, tracking average time to first action will also be beneficial for your business. In cases where customer inquiries are more complicated than others, it is natural for your social customer service team to need more time to respond to certain requests.
However, they should be able to provide an initial response within the expected time frame.
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Engagement with Unique Users
If you want a better understanding of the impact of social media and the reach of your brand, you need to track the number of times your company is mentioned each day and break that number down into unique mentions.
Pay more attention to these unique mentions and track the engagement your team has with this particular subset. This highlights the importance of social customer service in maintaining as well as building relationships with your customers.
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Customer Sentiment
Understanding customer sentiment should not only be seen as a key performance indicator, it can also provide a business with actionable insight. As you track the brand mentions every single time, you get to measure the sentiment in specific areas that matter to your business.
For example: a hotel should measure sentiments in areas like ease of check-in, booking, food, room amenities etc. At the same time, a manufacturer of consumer packaged goods should measure sentiments for product quality, price, purchase process, availability, and offers.
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Total Mentions That Require Actions
A business should track all brand mentions that require actions. Setting up separate feeds populated with customer mentions flagged as requiring a response can make this easier for the team. With a queue of mentions that require action, your team will be able to deliver effective responses without missing a single customer.
As a need connoisseur of social media customer service, you should start by tracking these five key performance indicators and add them to the list of tracked data as per the unique requirements of your business.
Tracking these on a regular basis will equip your social customer service team with the insight and tools they need to provide high-quality customer experience to your customers.
