By Keegan Weber, DataEQ Product Specialist
The growing demand for social customer service
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that customer complaints were on the rise, citing a survey from the firm, Customer Care Measurement and Consulting. The survey found 55% of complainants who complained using social media did not receive a response. The firm attributed this increase in complaints to the growth of digital channels, including live chat and social media - up to 43% from 12% in 2017.
Similarly, DataEQ’s Africa Cross-Industry Sentiment Index found that less than half of all customers who reached out to their bank, insurer, or telco on social media received a response from their service provider.
DataEQ’s research has also shown a steady increase in customer complaints and queries on social media in 2020, likely a result of social distancing measures and Covid-19 lockdowns. Firms that have been caught off guard by the sudden influx of customer service tickets on social media are paying the price in lower satisfaction metrics and increased risk of churn. Large organisations that were still using community management tools to respond to social customer service have quickly realised these tools are not equipped to deal with the scale of growing online requests and risks of not responding adequately.
Equipping your organisation to deal with demand and provide responsive service
DataEQ Engage platform is being used by leading telcos, banks and insurers to provide responsive service on social media. Unlike our competitors, we’re not reliant on simple keyword matching and rule-based prioritisation to find the customer mentions that require attention. DataEQ’s Crowd of human verifiers is able to review and tag each mention for its importance, ensuring that users are delivered each ticket by order of priority and risk. This means less time for support agents to find the important mentions in a messy queue, and more time to respond adequately to each customer’s request.
Alongside the content prioritisation of our Crowd, we’ve recently added two new improvements to Engage that allow users to add information about their customers and staff skill-set to further optimise workflow.
Ensure the specialists in your team handle the right customer requests
Ever wanted to route certain types of tickets to particular members of your team? For example, route Afrikaans language tickets to Afrikaans-speaking agents. Well, now you can, using personalised ticket queues in Engage.
Admin users can create tags that label tickets according to any of these criteria: keywords, language, location, or predefined tags created in Analyse. Tickets matching those criteria will then be visible to the users who have been selected to see the ticket tag. The usual priority system will still apply – tickets will be ranked by urgency based on their priority tag (Risk, Purchase, Cancel, Service). However, ticket tags will ensure that tickets are visible to specific users.
Premium service for premium clients on social media
Premium customers or members often get special perks in-store or at a branch, but that’s not always the case with online customer service. We’ve added a new feature to Engage that allows organisations to upload priority customer lists to Engage and ensure they get seen first by your customer service team. If your customers have agreed, you can add them to Engage as priority customers and indicate what type of customer they are, such as premium members or Platinum cardholders
DataEQ’s Engage platform is helping organisations resolve more customer service requests online and ensure that customers get the responsive service they’ve come to expect, from telcos to banks. Find out more about our Customer Service solution.