December 14, 2018
Essential workflow tips for digital customer service
Brands around the world have recognized the impact customer experience has on their bottom line. In 2019 organizations are investing harder in converting, retaining and growing customers with frictionless customer service – because it delivers.
The first step in driving up results in customer service is to review your groundwork, in the case of customer experience, this is your workflow. Establishing a clear workflow that allows multiple agents to work out of the same inbox is the first step for delivering effective service.
Over the next few articles, we are going to show you the areas to focus on, to take your CX from pretty good to pretty darn great. We’ll be covering CX topics such as tone of voice, reporting and more tool based tactics.
In an ideal world, you’ll have centralized service software, like Lexer Engage, that allows CX agents to view all incoming inquiries in one inbox. This is helpful for a number of reasons; firstly, it allows you to triage effectively by not missing any inquiries that arrive and in a timely manner.
Moving towards a single inbox triaging system
Triaging is the art of tagging and assigning customer inquiries to the correct person and in the right time frame. Effective triaging sets the right tone for a collaborative and effective team.
Lexer Engage brings queries from all networks into a single inbox that is updated in real-time. Using this frontline inbox you can rapidly tag and triage each query to the right agent for the job so teams can spend less time sifting through queries and more time crafting a great response.
Triaging queries should take less time than responding and engaging with customers
42% of customers expect a response within one hour and delivering rapid social customer care directly affects the bottom line, with recent research finding airline customers will pay $2.33 USD more for good social service, and this figure skyrockets to an extra $19.83 USD if a response is provided within 6 minutes (Twitter).
Centralizing the approval process
Lexer Engage allows you to assign content to other team members for immediate response.
It’s a one-click handover process that ensures the customer gets a rapid response from the right person for the job. This is extremely handy for escalating queries to managers, reviewing the work of new starters and maintaining continuity of response.
You can also consider restricting access to posts on a sensitive topic to subject matter experts to ensure a timely response in times of crisis.
Using classifications
Classifications are bespoke tags your team can add to content as it flows in. Using the apply bulk change function in Engage you can add or remove tags at scale, ready to report on later.
This section covers three ways you can use them to deliver great customer care: quality assurance, triage and inbound lead reporting.
Quality assurance
Classifications allow agents to tag content for quality assurance. For example, you can add a “QA” tag to your posts and a manager can jump in and review them later.
It’s an important feature to see how your team is tracking and identify areas for improvement with an accessible view of their activity that you can do in-platform any time you like.
Triage
Since classifications are so easy to search for, they’re really useful for triaging purposes, especially for teams working out of the same inbox (but often different countries, departments, and teams).
Frontline responders can tag posts as they come in and triage them to different departments to ensure a timely response, e.g. baggage claim, frequent flyer support, complaints, and public relations.
Inbound reporting
Classifications are also a powerful way to report on inbound leads. When a lead comes in, agents can create a classification for the channel, account or campaign for analysis later.
Surfacing priority content with filters
Create relevant queues by filtering content by:
- Network
- Handle
- Post type (DM, dark comment)
- Location
- Author
- Date
You can also rank your queue by recency and social media influence and exclude posts created by your brand.
Through the lens of community management, Engage’s filtering capability comes in particularly handy when posts go viral. High five! Agents can simply click the magnifying glass button to see responses to that particular post and get busy crafting their replies or closing off comments that don’t need a response with the apply bulk change function.
Streamline agent handover
Don’t let customer wait times be impacted by a team member going on leave.
Engage allows you to release ownership of objects assigned to you in the inbox and remove yourself from an approver’s list if you’re a manager.
It’s also really easy to change publishing permissions when team members move on and grant access to new starters once they’re fully up to speed.
If you enjoyed this article, keep an eye open for our other upcoming CX focussed resources:
- How to establish impactful CX reporting practices
- Unpacking the importance of conversation history in CX interactions
- How to create a brand voice that carries across your channels
- Resourcing your customer service teams for the win!
Ready to level-up? Download The 2019 CX Playbook, the ultimate resource and guide for CX professionals looking to level-up their customer engagements across owned social media.
Keen to take the next step in your CX journey? Talk to us about adopting a better social customer service platform for your enterprise business.