Last week our CEO, Leon Chaddock, took part in a webinar on Social Media Monitoring and Engagement for Utilities alongside Charles Stanton (British Gas), Bernard Mooney (Bord Gais Networks) and Luke Brynley-Jones (Our Social Times). For those of you that couldn’t make it, we’ve written up some of the key highlights.
The Challenge
Utilities offer some particular challenges where social media is concerned. Customers tend to be far more vocal about utilities than other brands and are far more willing to be critical. This isn’t helped by the fact that they are regularly forced to put their prices up. However, from adversity comes innovation and although it’s a challenge, it’s also a great opportunity.
Social Customer Service
Many utilities have really focused their efforts on using social media to provide quality customer service and mitigate negative news.
As Charles Stanton explained in relation to British Gas:
“Our customers will naturally have questions when they read stories in the press that convey a negative impression of our company, and our key strategy is to engage with each customer individually on their level.”
To enable this, British Gas now has a standalone social customer service team that monitors for and engages with customer queries 7 days a week. This does not mean copy and pasting a corporate response – it involves creating clear, tailored responses that actually help to resolve their problems. The team is able to utilise a large catalogue of engaging content including videos, blogs and statistics to help with this.
Using Videos
One of the things that British Gas has done is to create videos that pre-empt queries from customers. For example, before their profits were announced last month, they released a video explaining how the profit the business makes is used.
Although people won’t often take the time to read through pages and pages of information, a 30 second video can be much more effective. Bernard explained that Bord Gais Networks are also using this tactic to try and deflect customer service calls. If you can direct people with common problems (such as how to read your meter) to a website or YouTube video you can improve the customer experience and save money at the same time. The key is to keep customers informed.
Restrictions/ Regulations
Recently OfGem has handed out some multi-million pound fines to utilities. One such example cited a company that had not kept a record of all the complaints they’d received and had failed to put in adequate service to deal with complaints. The fact that companies are being punished for poor customer services should be driving us towards social customer service.
Another thing to be mindful of is that to protect customer data, you will often need to move the conversation offline. Whilst in an ideal world, you would be able to resolve the problem via the same channel that the customer contacted you on, this isn’t always realistic. Interestingly, 76% of companies cite the protection of confidential information as being the biggest social media legal risk.
Scaling Up
A key consideration for any big business is how social customer service can be scaled up during a crisis or periods of high activity. Although a small team may be able to respond to all enquiries on an average day, you cannot always predict when spikes in activity will occur.
O2 provided an excellent example of this during their network outage last year. They were able to mobilise and empower staff from across the organisation to get on Twitter and start responding to customers who were experiencing difficulties. They had all been given training that allowed them to engage on social media, even though it wasn’t part of their day-to-day jobs. It had great impact and helped to reduce the negative impact of the crisis.
Proactive vs Reactive
You need to be careful if you are going out to people proactively, rather than responding to a query specifically directed to you. Forums are a common space where you might see people stepping in to clarify points, but if your customers are talking amongst themselves it might seem intrusive for a company to step in.
However, if you can find the right balance it can very quickly pay dividends. Once you actually engage with a customer it can go a long way to changing attitudes and building a positive relationship.
Measuring the Impact of Social Media
There are all sorts of ways to measure the impact of social customer service and these will vary from business to business. Some companies will measure the amount of money saved as a result of deflecting phone calls, whilst others look at resolution time, response time, sentiment analysis and the number of complaints solved.
Interestingly, British Gas has embraced the concept of Social NPS by creating their own score that combines reach, engagement and sentiment.
Integrated Social CRM
One of the most common mistakes brands make on social media is to assume that social media is only about one-time problem solving, not about developing a long-term relationship. If a customer contacts you on social media it’s important to know when you last had contact with them, what they said, who spoke to them and how it was dealt with.
It’s also important to remember that social media is not a silo. A social media strategy needs to tie in with a wider customer engagement strategy to ensure a consistent approach across all channels, whether that’s in-person, via email, webchat, phone, Twitter or Facebook.
To find out how Sentiment Metrics can help your company provide effective social customer service, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!