Fortune 10 retailer supercharges social strategy to address digital needs of new-age customers
In-channel resolution leads to over 35k social media queries resolved in 24 hours
35,000+Number of customer queries
24hrsCustomer query resolution time period
$200K Annual savingsClient background
The client is a retail industry leader that operates a chain of hypermarkets and grocery stores. With a massive worldwide presence, the client needed a social media partner that could support its growing business needs and address the demands of today’s digital customer. With hyper-personalized conversations being the key to new-age customer experiences, it was imperative to not just have a solid social media presence, but a brand voice that transcended communication channels.
Business challenge
Existing social media efforts were fragmented across the client’s internal teams, and customer care issues were not optimized for resolution. Prior vendors were directing customers to an 800 number or an online form. They were handling only owned conversations, used automated responses, and were achieving just a 4% responsive rate.
The client received more than 10 million social media mentions a year. With such a large volume, the business challenge focused on filtering the noise to find actionable posts that provide the most ROI.
The client also noticed a rise in negative sentiment and social media incidents that were negatively affecting the company’s online reputation. A large part of this problem was coming from local store pages, where customers were demanding resolution to their poor shopping experience.
The client was looking for an end-to-end solution that addressed both owned and earned responses. With social media mentions slated to grow 20% YoY, they were looking for a partner who would help with brand affinity, data analytics, and crisis management.
The solution
Starting in April 2018, HGS Digital set out to provide an end-to-end social engagement solution, bringing together the right people, processes, automation, and analytics to address these obstacles.
Technology and analytics
Partnering with a best-in-class social engagement platform, HGS Digital employed intelligent automation to filter out non-actionable posts leaving only engage-worthy mentions in agent queues, thereby addressing the issue of volume. This tool also leverages rule-based routing to prioritize the post and route to the right social media agents in customer care, marketing, or PR. Irrelevant content in workflow declined as HGS Digital worked to identify trending topics which only loosely related to brand keywords, and route them away from agent workflows.
Using analytics and a structured tagging system, HGS Digital decoded the voice of the customer and reports on competitors and trends to help make operational business decisions on what kind of products and services are popular in the industry.
People expertise
HGS Digital designed a playbook specifically for the client, mandating that all customer interactions be resolved in-channel, reducing expensive call volume into the contact center. They hired and trained a team of over 70 highly skilled brand ambassadors to effectively engage customers on social media. These agents have undergone an extensive four-week training program that equipped them with the knowledge needed to amplify positive brand moments and organically respond to queries, inviting the customers to work with them for faster resolution. The agents have been trained to respond with empathy, creativity and wit, to ensure responses generate likes, shares, comments, and retweets. They are equipped to analyze the biggest conversation drivers and impact creators in order to fix what’s broken. The level of brand engagement the agents generate by creating meaningful engagements has helped in converting irate customers into brand advocates.
Crisis management
HGS Digital set up a 24/7 crisis monitoring center to mitigate and prevent social crisis and to quickly respond to potential crisis situations. An important aspect of this lies in data collection – gathering data on brand reputation and staying updated on corporate and employee relations – to see what’s being spoken about the brand and how to use it to the client’s advantage.
Results
The success of the project ultimately lies in the synergy between customer experience and marketing – better resolution means better customer sentiment, which also means that every dollar spent on social is amplified, not diminished- by poor customer experience.
Technology wins:
$12M+Cost avoidance in the first year by filtering 8.5X the number of non-actionable mentions via enhanced automation
54%Reduction in irrelevant workflow content through intelligent routing
40K+# of spam cases removed
81%Increase in response rate over previous vendor
People wins:
$200K Annual savings from in-channel resolution by trained agents
19.2M# of likes, shares and comments, providing many social wins and huge ROI from cross-promoting services and online sales
400K+# of customer mentions addressed annually through social channels
85%Response rate with customized prioritization of the moments that matter most
| Before HGS | After HGS (2 years) |
|---|---|
| Average response rate – 4% | Average response rate – 35% |
| Average response time – 12 hrs | Average response time – 30 mins |
Cost Avoidance – $12M
Supercharge your social media ROI
Is your social media in-channel resolution strategy saving you $200K annually? Let us help you ramp up your social media ROI by creating a trustworthy social presence.
