How to Staff a Star Social Support Team
As you step inside any contact center or meet with any support
manager, there is always one common theme: staffing. It is no secret that
social has completely changed the way companies staff support teams.
Understanding how social has upended certain hiring practices while reinforcing
others is essential to recruiting and staffing your social teams.
An Organization of Experts
Many organizations are still building a social customer response
team by handpicking or selectively hiring social agents with experience in a
traditional call center (often their own). It is important to recognize that social is
not achannel and therefore, companies must look
across the entire organization of experts as potential points of customer
engagement. In practical terms, that means any employee is potentially an agent. That
is really hard for some companies to grasp.
On a similar note, brands should not overcomplicate social.
Thinking about the core customer care team engaging via social media support
model isn’t all that different than any other support medium. Sure, the skills
may be different – agents have to type as well as talk– and the risks may be
higher -– accidentally responding with information about a customer’s
account on a public instead of private message, but the basic support
process—listening to and empathizing with customers, crafting a solution and
following it through to closure—is the same.
The Making of a Great Social
Agent
The basic support process guided by the customer care team is also
availed by other potential engagers. Theseengagers are employees from product
development, innovation teams and other teams that have deep and specialized
process knowledge and as such are part of (directly, or as back-up) to the
support team. Keeping this in mind, staffing for social means considering both
the core support role and the experts that support these agents. All of
these aspects of the support team allow companies to enhance their ability to engage
customers at scale.
When a company can identify their experts, they need to define what
it means to be a great social agent. More than anything else, a good social
agent understands simultaneously the business objectives of the organization,
the situation and context giving rise to the customer inquiry, the resources
at-hand that can be applied to the issue, and any constraints around the
potential solution path. This has been true of support professionals all along,
and surely continues in an age of public, visible support interactions.
Establishing Performance
Metrics
Once establishing what the expectations are of a good social agent,
it is important to define performance metrics. There can be more nuanced
metrics related to productivity due to the sheer volume of social traffic.
Some traditional metrics, like handle time and first contact resolution,
may need to be tweaked a little due to the asynchronous nature of social.
At the core, the most meaningful business metrics – ROI, achievement of
revenue goals and customer satisfaction – remain unchanged.
Finding the Right Agent
So now you are probably thinking, “OK we know who to look for and
what to look for, but how do we find them?” In the past –and by past, I mean 5
years ago – reward programs targeted towards incentivizing experienced
staffers to join the social ranks may have worked. But, today we are seeing
certain agent qualities like empathy and humility trump policies that reward
tenure. What’s important to investigate however is that the rewards for social
support agents should be the same for normal support employees.
Let’s put it this way: if social agents are not motivated by the
same rewards as other employees, there is something wrong at an organizational
level that probably needs to be addressed before a social engagement program is
considered! Effective social engagement—leading to visible customer
advocacy—depends heavily on purpose-based alignment across the organization.
The excitement of support, whether as a font-line social agent or a
deep-knowledge process expert, is that you never really know what the next
request is going to be. Combine that with the almost universal personal
satisfaction that comes from helping someone, makes for a very exciting job.
That is what should get employees fired up about going to work.
Your Star Social Support Team
By expanding social engagement across the organization by way of
experts, employees connect more deeply with the shared business objectives of
that organization. Tangible connection to shared purpose is absolutely
associated with—in fact, it is a pre-cursor to—above-average employee
retention. As a result, this attracts the best and brightest in the field.
Set up a social strategy with agents and knowledgeable experts and
retention will take care of itself.
If a brand can focus on these few things when recruiting and
staffing their social support teams, they will be golden!
Link Address:
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-staff-star-social-support-team?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=hootsuite_tweets
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