Case Study: Retail
Serving up best-in-class social customer care and reputation management
Building customer relationships and a digital intelligence hub for a leading restaurant chain
5Xresponse rate as the previous social media solution
2Xfaster response time due to HGS’s content prioritization
815K likes, shares, and comments from HGS’s responsesClient background
The client is a Fortune 500, quick-service restaurant franchise serving over 69 million customers daily in over 100 countries.
Business challenge
Every 42 seconds, someone posts a comment or question on social media about this client’s food. This equates to well over 4 million mentions a year. The reality is not all of the mentions require a response (e.g., “I went to client’s restaurant today”). The business challenge comes down to limited resources. With such large volume, how do you filter through the noise to find the actionable posts?
Part of this large volume was coming from 14,000 local restaurant pages, where customers were demanding an answer to their question or a resolution to their bad CX. The client wanted a local feel—as though customers are talking with their neighborhood restaurant on Facebook.
In addition to the volume, the client also was noticing an online increase in negative sentiment toward the brand and its products. There was an imminent need to help manage its online reputation.
The client’s internal marketing teams were also demanding real-time insights on how specific campaigns were performing on social media.
The solution
HGS brought the people, partners, expertise, process, tool, AI, automation, and analytics to address all of the obstacles the client faced on social media.
In English and Spanish, HGS’s social care agents provide monitoring, engagement, insights, and analytics 18 hours per day, 7 days a week. One team is located at HGS’s newly built Digital Intelligence Hub in Peoria, Illinois, with the remainder of the team as well as our data analyst on site in Chicagoland. Teams connect digitally via video conferencing and, of course, social media.
People and Expertise
HGS hired a team of 20 (with a projected ramp to 30) brand ambassadors who possessed the right skills and talents needed to effectively engage on social media and respond to the client’s global mobile app reviews within the Apple and Android stores. We put the agent-ambassadors through an extensive three-week training program that included topics such as understanding the top contact drivers, how to follow the rules of engagement manual, writing with use of the brand and local voice, spotting a crisis, engaging with influencers, and more. In addition, we brought on two leaders who possess more than 10 years of social media experience with Fortune 100 brands to help design, run, and operate the program.
Process
Our team put together a Social Customer Care Playbook. The Playbook includes rules of engagement and best practices, process and workflow, quality management program, case management and design, reporting and KPIs, ideal agent profile, and training program.
AI and Automation
We partnered with the creators of a best-in-class social engagement platform that uses artificial intelligence to help us filter out the non-actionable posts, leaving only engage-worthy messages. This tool leverages rules-based routing and automation to help prioritize the posts based on context and keywords and route to the right social care agents or internal teams, whether that’s customer care, marketing, or PR.
PR Partner
We leverage the expertise of a PR partner to help protect the brand from a crisis that goes viral while also amplifying the positive buzz by tapping into influencers and celebrities.
Analytics
Using text analytics and a structured tagging system, we decode the voice of the customer (VOC) and inform the enterprise on competitors and trends to help make operational business decisions. When a marketing campaign is launched, we track the VOC in reference to the campaign and work closely with the client’s digital and marketing teams to track progress and effectiveness.
Results
100%more reporting insights than ever before, including in-depth VOC reports
7Mengagements tagged and reviewed in the first year, including owned and earned content
5X response rate as previous social media solution
815Klikes, shares, and comments from HGS’s responses
2X faster response time due to content prioritization
Millions in cost savings by filtering 10% more non-actionable posts and tagging via enhanced automation
