Your social customer service vendor checklist

People share hundreds of millions of Tweets every day - expressing their thoughts, experiences and opinions - making Twitter one of the top channels where customers engage with brands, including airing their customer service woes.

• 82% of people on Twitter actively engage with brands¹
  
• 80% of social care requests sent via social platforms also happen on Twitter²
  
• 74% of social media professionals also reported using social platforms to perform some customer care³ 
  
• The average cost of a social interaction is only $1 compared to $6 for a call center interaction⁴

Adding social interaction to your customer service offering makes good business sense. Doing it right, means considering a range of administrative, technical and cultural factors. The following checklist can help guide you to the best solution for your business.

The Social Customer Service Checklist

• Customer Service Analytics
  
  Key care-focused metrics should include First Response Time, Average Handling Time and Time to Resolution. What metrics are available and will you be able to create custom metrics to align with your specific business needs?

• Approval Workflows
  
  Will you be able to create permission-based custom workflows for the purposes of agent collaboration, content approval and quality control?

• Customer Experience Auditing
  
  The ability to access and export the full conversation history and call agent actions is especially critical in highly regulated industries such as financial services.

• Case Management and Ticketing
  
  Can you create cases or tickets for follow-up and/or escalation? What about connectors or integrations to commonly used case management platforms?

• Customer Service Chatbots
  
  Can you integrate chatbots? Twitter has deployed a number of features to improve customer experiences such as welcome messages and quick replies. Will you have access to these features?

• Compliance and Information Security
  
  Whether it’s SOC2 accreditation or other certifications important in your industry and/or country.

• Conversation history
  
  Threading public tweets and private Direct Messages together into a conversation view provides valuable context should an issue need to be escalated or passed to another agent. Twitter has made it easy for brands to move a customer from a Tweet into a private message with the launch of Direct Message deep links.

• Credibility
  
  Specific industries tend to have their own needs when it comes to customer care. Does the vendor understand and have experience in your industry? Ask for case studies and customer references.

• CRM & ID Matching
  
  Can you add tags and notes to social profiles? How are these additions added to your CRM? Twitter allows brands to match user IDs to customer records under specific circumstances - if the user has expressly consented or the matching is being done based on publicly available data and/or data provided directly by the applicable Twitter user that an individual would reasonably expect to be used for that purpose.

• Data Access
  
  What are the relationships with the social networks being featured? Enterprise level? Whitelisted access to API feeds? These relationships matter, when it comes to your mission-critical customer care operation. Certified Twitter Official Partners can be found here https://partners.twitter.com/en.

• Customer Care Feedback
  
  Can you deploy CSAT and NPS surveys as well as track sentiment conversion? Twitter’s Customer Feedback feature enables people to privately share their opinions with a business after a service interaction. Will you have the option to access this feature?

• Integrations & pre-built Connectors
  
  Which third-party software integrations are important to you? If you can access them, how? Are they uni-directional, bi-directional or an iframe? What about custom integrations?

• Customer Knowledge Base
  
  Is there a built-in knowledge base for care agents with suggested answers based on the context of the message? What about connectors to your existing knowledge base or content management system?

• Onboarding
  
  What will the onboarding process look like, both for product training and the softer side of social care such as establishing an appropriate tone of voice?

• Routing & Prioritization
  
  How will social messages be routed and prioritized to appropriate care agents? There are many options including routing based on keywords, influencer score and CRM history. Don’t forget language-specific routing for localization and global coverage.

Your customers are waiting for you on Twitter. Are you ready to join them? Get started at data.twitter.com where you’ll find case studies and a list of Twitter Official Partners or to get in touch with our team. 

¹2017 Twitter User Survey

² 2016 Twitter Advertising Survey

³ The Harris Poll, Social Media 2.0 How Social Data Informs Business Decision Making

⁴ Forrester Report 2015: Contact Centers Must Go Digital or Die