In her BlogWell presentation, UPS' Corporate Public Communications Manager, Debbie Curtis-Magley, shares their lessons from social media customer service.
Central team account staffed 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET weekdays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET weekends Encourage customers to DM or e-mail details to twitter@ups.com Discourage customers from sharing tracking numbers via public tweets At times, some customers don ’ t respond … that ’ s o.k. as long as we make an effort to offer help
From a PR perspective, we knew that customer service was a key topic we needed to support in social media. If we weren ’ t demonstrating support to customers, they were not likely to pay attention when we needed them to listen … like during a news event Communications team responded to customer issues in Twitter and direct them to email details; Customer Service team handled emails It took a year of ongoing discussions and sharing metrics with our Customer Service leadership to convince them of the importance of social media. But once they came on board, they fully committed with support. The Customer Service leadership was initially reluctant, thinking social media was a fad primarily used by the millennial generation. After just a few days of monitoring, we found that small business owners and others were posting about UPS with brutal honesty. A few stumbles … initially had several senior-level reps with individually named accounts. But their time was also split supporting corporate level concerns coming from a variety of channels, such as letters to the CEO. On a channel like Twitter, this created a challenge for customers who were working with Chris one day, but found that they needed to connect with a different rep the next day for follow up questions. For Twitter, the experience led us to establish a central team account (@UPSHelp). It gave us the ability to provide consistent and frequent support, and offer flexibility for staff schedules. We work closely with our colleagues from The UPS Store to coordinate customer assistance where both UPS and The UPS Store are involved.
Here ’ s a great example of getting that 2 nd chance We ’ ve seen tremendous improvement with our positive to negative ratio of social media commentary. Overall, the team handles an average of 850 tweets and 375 Facebook messages a week. We currently provide support in English – regardless of country
We recently launched a new service called UPS My Choice, which addresses some of the pain points that consumers have with receiving shipments. Like missing a delivery or feeling trapped at home waiting on a package that requires a signature. We ’ ve orchestrated a careful balance of assisting customers with problems and promoting the service when it seems to fit their needs. Serving the customer takes priority over marketing messages.
Listen and learn Understand what customers are saying (or not saying) about your company and your industry – identify top issues. For UPS, we quickly learned that Twitter was a top source for customer complaints and that ’ s were we started to connect. One of our biggest lessons was that by helping 1 customer we actually influence many. Just as the customer ’ s network saw their complaint, they also get exposed to the praise when we resolve a problem. Lead with experts Partner with customer service and let them take the lead to define the game plan for social media – they are the experts for solving customer problems Have a personality Social media is a great channel for brands … and their customer service reps to let personalities shine. Measure, measure, measure At UPS we look at a variety of metrics, including the ratio of positive to negative mentions, the number of positive impressions generated by customers in response to our assistance – it helps us track our effectiveness Be flexible and evolve Where we started is not where we are at now. On Twitter, we started with individually named accounts, e.g. @ThomasAtUPS – but we realized over time it was more helpful to support customers through one team account vs. multiple individual accounts. We also extended our support hours.