Online Service & Community Management

As we work with clients across a variety of industries – retail, financial services, etc – one area that is becoming more critical, yet remains a bit of a blindspot, is Online Service and Community Management.

People are looking to get in touch with companies every day and do it in a variety of ways. Traditionally this has been through sales consultants – picking up the phone or typing an email to a friendly sales team on the other end. Nowadays, people want to get in touch with companies more easily and efficiently through their social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and more, are becoming key customer service tools.

Quite often, infrastructure isn’t set up by a company to respond. As a result, a captive audience is largely ignored. The implications include damage to the brand, negative NPS scores, and lost revenue.

Solving this isn’t as easy as it might seem, but it isn’t too hard to get started on the journey. Here are a few ideas to get you moving:

Process flows:

Work out some key stakeholders who can be responsible for reviewing and responding to community engagement.
Create some timeframes on when to review and when to respond, working out the ideal turnaround time for responses.
Develop FAQs and preapproved responses to streamline communications.

Management tools:

Our favourite tool is Agorapulse. This social media management tool allows us to view all engagements by users, easily organise, optimise and automate communications with users. This also provides us with reporting tools to quantify our results!
Another alternative is Creator Studio. This is a free platform linked to Facebook and Instagram accounts which provides an inbox where you can categorise and organise your interactions.
Using live spreadsheets can improve the efficiency of communications between stakeholders who need to monitor user responses.

Measurement framework:

Establish targets that you would like to meet. Working out some goals and metrics is the first step to achieving them!
Keep a response log of engagements from the month and categorise them according to your metrics. Alternatively, use a management tool like Agorapulse which can help automate your reporting.

If you’re still not sure where to start… shoot us a traditional customer service email OR hit up our DM’s, because that’s where we are all getting these days.