Outsource Consultants' Blog

The article “How To Measure Customer Service Effectiveness” by Collin Burke features an interview with Shep Hyken, customer service and experience expert. Customer opinion ultimately determines your service quality, so it’s important that you know to measure the right metrics and feedback to know how effective your company can be in delivering customer service. Hyken gives his insights on how to measure customer service effectiveness, how to survey customers, and more. Click the link below to read the full article:

How To Measure Customer Service Effectiveness – Collin Burke

The article “Beyond engagement: Top must-haves to drive customer experience forward” by Ekaterina Walter discusses that customers don’t just expect resolution from traditional customer service outlets, but they expect to be answered to on the internet quickly as well. The topics in this article include the following:

• Foundations for Engagement Success
• Who responds?
• What to respond to?
• How do you track social?
• Beyond the responses
• Cross-silo collaboration
• Predictive analytics and sentiment analysis

To read the full article, click the link below:

Beyond engagement: Top must-haves to drive customer experience forward – Ekaterina Walter

Customer service has evolved substantially along with technology. First the norm was to use face-to-face interaction, then the telephone, then email. Now social media is becoming the normal way for customers to communicate with companies. For example, did you know that 70% of people use Twitter for customer service? The article “Social Media: The Next Customer Service Norm” by Daniel James discusses the rise of social media for customer service. To read the full article, click the link below:

Social Media: The Next Customer Service Norm – Daniel James

If your small company is doing well in most areas, it’s very easy to forget about customer complaints on social media. If your heldesk is indifferent to customer comments on your social media pages, this could end up being detrimental to your business. The Huffington Post article, “3 Ways Helpdesk Indifference Will Kill Your Business” by Jun Loayza, discusses how silence, inapplicable responses, and poor customer service history can cause damage for your company. To read the full article, click the link below:

3 Ways Helpdesk Indifference Will Kill Your Small Business - Jun Loayza

If your company uses social media, you should be using it to deliver customer service. Customers use social media to voice their positive and negative opinions, but if their opinions aren’t heard, they’ll be more inclined to turn away from your company. The article “How to Offer Great Customer Service With Social Media” by Alleli Aspili gives 5 tips on how to use social media effectively to gain fans and deliver excellent customer service:

1. Create a clear social media strategy
2. Think before you "speak"
3. Time is of the essence – Fix complaints, immediately
4. Consider outsourcing your customer service
5. Always ask for feedback

To read the full Sendible article, “How to Offer Great Customer Service With Social Media” by Alleli Aspili, click the link below:

http://sendible.com/insights/how-to-offer-great-customer-service-with-social-media/

“According to research from Aberdeen Group, 80 percent of companies are expected to adopt social media as a customer service portal by the end of the year.” – Kiran Ross (Contributing Writer for the Kansas City Business Journal)

Social media is now a customer service requirement for many companies. Customers aren’t satisfied with traditional communication channels and want answers instantly. There are four benefits of using social media for customer service to consider:

1. Streamlined communication
2. Immediacy
3. Cultivation of brand ambassadors
4. It’s easy to close the loop

The article “Social Media Matters: 4 benefits of a customer service portal” by Kiran Ross (Kansas City Business Journal) goes into detail about these benefits. To read the article, click the link below:

Social Media Matters: 4 benefits of a customer service portal - Kiran Ross

In order to grasp the full impact and ROI of social customer service, companies need to measure it in a way that enables comparison with—and benchmarking alongside—more traditional customer care channels, such as phone, email, and live web chat. Without measuring real customer service KPIs over social, it is difficult to resource teams for spikes in volume, improve the quality of agent performance and deliver the best customer experience possible. ICMI has recently written an article outlining the most important metrics to measure in social media customer service. A summary of that article is below:

Coming on the heels of a November 2013 customer service benchmark report, eDigitalResearch has released a follow-up study reaffirming its core finding: Live chat is the most satisfying modality for customer engagement. Smart Customer Service posted an article on eDigitalResearch’s findings in the summary below:

The study polled 2,000 nationally representative U.K. customers about their preferences and experiences when dealing with brands over live chat, email, social media, apps, traditional mail, phone, and short message service (SMS). For those that had used live chat to contact a company in the last year (26 percent), 73 percent reported that they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the experience they had. This is more or less on par with the numbers eDigitalResearch saw in November. Usage, however, is up slightly, from around 24 percent to 26 percent.