Using technology to drive positive brand sentiment for F&B giant’s social media

Machine learning and agent training drives 400% increase in productivity

Overview

A food and beverage (F&B) giant was struggling with its social media management and negative sentiment around the brand. In late 2017, HGS was brought in as their community management partner to take care of the brand’s national and local social media presence across popular platforms. In less than three years, this led to a 2X YoY increase in productivity with the help of technology and AI.

2X Year over Year increase in productivity

5X%Increase in response time due to better tagging and content prioritization

20%Increase in non-actionable posts filtered and tagged via automation

Client background

The client is the world’s largest restaurant chain by revenue, serving over 69 million customers daily and the world’s second largest private employer. Founded in 1955, they now have over 30,000 restaurants in over 100 countries and are credited with revolutionizing the food industry. They have a very strong brand recognition and use social media to stay relevant in digital times.

Business challenge

As the largest quick service restaurant (QSR) in the world, there’s a mention about the client every 42 seconds on social media. This equates to over 4 million mentions a year in the US alone. Part of this large volume comes from 15,000 individual restaurant pages, where customers reach out for answers to their questions or resolutions to service issues. There was also a significant increase in negative sentiment toward the brand and its products largely driven by a lack of response to their contact attempts through social media. There was an imminent need for a solution to better manage customer resolutions and amplify positive brand moments.

The solution

While HGS has been the client’s customer care partner for 10 years, it was brought onboard as the client’s community management partner beginning in September 2017. HGS brought together the right mix of technology, people, machine learning expertise and process management to address all the social media obstacles.

A team of over 20 full-time social care agents provides monitoring, engagement and insights on the company’s corporate Facebook handle, 15,000 local restaurant Facebook handles, Twitter handles, and Instagram. They support 18-hour coverage, 7 days a week, in both English and Spanish.

HGS employed a three-pronged approach to address the client’s issues:

Technology and machine learning

With Sprinklr, its social media management partner, HGS leverages training and machine learning (ML) to generate customer-level engagement and identify customer issues that need resolution. In this way, the technology continuously learns from actions and decisions on every mention that it responds to. This helps in the following ways:

It identifies the mentions that require quick and immediate agent response, thereby enhancing CX.
It helps filter out the non-actionable content that doesn’t require any responses- in most cases, spam.
It automates the tagging when agent intervention isn’t required, creating a database for reports.

Agent care

HGS put together a playbook that included rules of engagement, best practices, process and workflow, quality management program, case management and design, reporting and KPIs, ideal agent profile, and a comprehensive training program.

The team of social care agents underwent an extensive four-week training program that included topics such as understanding the top contact drivers, using the rules of engagement manual, adopting the brand voice and local voice, spotting a crisis, engaging with influencers, and more. These brand ambassadors helped in amplifying positive mentions, which helped drive a higher positive brand sentiment.

Crisis management

There are a lot of crisis moments in social media that can cause irreparable reputational damage if not addressed tactfully and decisively. It is imperative to protect the company from this impact by mitigating the risk as soon as it hits the social media channel. HGS leverages rules-based routing and intelligent automation to prioritize the mentions based on context and keywords and route to the right social care agents or internal teams, whether that’s customer care, marketing, or PR.

Results

With technology working in the background to prioritize the most responsive and urgent content, agents were able to increase productivity 2X YoY. This also allows the team to resolve over 400,000 customer inquiries annually.

5M# of mentions tagged and reviewed in the first year, including owned and earned content

2.5M# of total likes, shares and comments from the responses

5X%Increase in response time due to better tagging and content prioritization

20%Increase in non-actionable posts filtered and tagged via enhanced automation

100%Increase in reporting insights, including in-depth voice of the customer reports

Ramp up your social media ROI

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