Do you have a small social customer care team? Here are 15 tips that your tiny team can follow to have a big impact on social.

1. 15 Tips
For Small Social Customer Care Teams

2. Here’s what your small customer care team
can do to have a big impact on social

3. Clearly display your business
hours
o Small teams usually have limited
operating hours. Make sure your
business hours are clearly noted on
your Facebook page, Twitter bio or
Instagram bio, and stick to them!
Compare your current
hours to your incoming
volume hourly rates. Do
you need to expand or
adjust your customer
support hours?
Level Up
1

4. Enable sound notifications
o If your responsibilities are spread
across departments or platforms,
the "dun-DUN" sound will ensure
you are notified when a new
message enters your queue.
Set up custom away
states to better measure
where else you are
spending your time. Can
any of that work be
delegated to another
individual or department
with more resources?
Level Up
2

5. Centralize your go-to resources
o Make use of a centralized resource
center. Keep it updated with
necessary links, articles and info
that team members can use during
support interactions.
Empower your
managers and team
leads to update the
resource center in
real-time during a crisis
or irregular operations.
Level Up
3

6. Get into a cadence
o To improve productivity and
accountability, find a routine that
works for your team and stick with
it. Split shifts between days, check
your queues once an hour when
you're short on time, or run weekly
reports for stakeholders.
Busy weekend? Get all
hands on deck every
Monday morning to crush
the over-the-weekend
queue for a more
productive week.
Level Up
4

7. Keep it consistent
o Make sure your customers are
getting the same answer to their
questions and concerns regardless
of where they are talking to you
(whether through social, phone,
email, etc.).
Communicate with other
customer-facing
individuals at your
organization. Do you all
agree on your brand voice
and share the same
customer philosophies?
Level Up
5

8. Resolve issues where they begin
o Keep customers within their
selected channel to create quicker
resolution and a more seamless
experience for both customers and
team members.
Use technology to securely verify
customers’ information. You’ll
shave time off each customer
request by securely transmitting
and storing this info within the
conversation history, and will
provide a truly effortless
experience for the customer.
Level Up
6

9. Document your work
o Keep a record of your team’s
workflow, as well as any
modifications to it. If one team
member leaves for vacation, you
will better understand how and why
your workflow is what it is.
Audit your team’s workflow and
highlight areas where you are
succeeding or need
improvement. This will help your
small team manage incoming
volume to the best of your ability.
Level Up
7

10. Automate all things
o To save time on every social
engagement, triage, route or tag
conversations via keywords. Use
automations whenever possible to
make things easier on your team.
Set up an automation to
automatically bring pending
conversations back to the queue
after a given amount of time. By
doing this, you can surprise and
delight with proactive follow-up,
without the extra work.
Level Up
8

11. Stay focused, filter out spam
o If the amount of incoming volume is
overwhelming, build rules around
conversations that don't need to be
seen. Filter out spam through
automations based on message
structure and keywords.
Keep track of conversations (type
and quantity) that are removed
from the queue via rules or
automations. Use this data for
improved reporting and
conversation tracking.
Level Up
9

12. Be methodical with a
first-in-first-out approach
o During business hours, handle
conversations in a first-in-first-out
fashion to prevent some customers
from waiting longer than others.
Have team members focus on
crushing urgent and important
conversations first by using a
first-in-first-out approach within a
particular topic.
Level Up
10

13. Prioritize urgent conversations
o Apply topics to conversations to
surface higher priority messages,
temporarily filter out other
conversations as needed, or route
requests to the correct department.
Have one team member from
another customer-facing team
occasionally jump into the queue
to handle conversations within a
topic that falls under their realm.
This increases the number of
engagements you will be able to
handle and stakeholder buy-in as
more agents are involved.
Level Up
11

14. Label VIPs for priority support
o Are your VIPs your executives,
loyalty/rewards members, or social
influencers? When applicable, apply
a VIP label and bump the
conversations to the top of the
queue, no matter which order
you're sorting.
Create reminders to celebrate
exciting moments like birthdays
and anniversaries with your VIPs.
Level Up
12

15. In order to scale, do things that
scale
o Plan for both the growth of your team
and the growth of your company.
Familiarize yourself with agent
performance metrics and create
baseline goals and KPIs. Are customers
asking for something you don’t yet
support? Track their conversations and
use those insights when your company
is ready to make those changes.
Ask your sales, product, and
marketing teams what kinds of
customer insights they're
interested in seeing. Work with
them on increasing resources for
your team by helping them
obtain these insights.
Level Up
13

16. Turn insights into action
o Are there certain times of the year
when it’s worth adding another team
member? Track trends over time and
report on these metrics to
stakeholders and other executives to
make a case for needed resources.
Gather customer
feedback/sentiment for a
quarter. Bring these reports to
other teams and present
suggestions internally on behalf
of your customers.
Level Up
14

17. Integrate with other platforms
and CRMs
o By connecting your customer service
technology with your CRM records,
your systems can begin to talk with
each other and cut out human error
and time spent switching between
applications.
Provide a secure means of
transmitting customers’
personally identifiable
information straight to your CRM
via a secure authentication
process.
Level Up
15

18. Want to learn how technology can help your
small team scale?
Let’s chat