How to measure your customer service via email and social media

Email and social media are two efficient channels to assess your customer satisfaction.  

Ignoring the fundamentals of tracking customer service could be detrimental to your business. The overall satisfaction can be measured, of course, by many traditional approaches such as survey your customer, call and thank them as well as conduct focus groups.

But they are not enough. Here we focus on two effective digital channels – email and social – to help you improve your customer service.

Email

Email is one of the most efficient channels to assess the customer experience with your brand. For example, you can use email tools like Survey Monkey to deliver a set of surveys in order to receive qualitative feedback.

In the process, one question is how often should you send emails to track and measure your audience satisfaction?

There’s no single benchmark as you need to analyze your data points to decide the frequency.

“You should optimize frequency for each individual. For example, a loyal customer may want to receive an email from your brand every day. But if a consumer doesn’t have a tight relationship with your brand, he or she may only want to receive an email on a bi-weekly basis,” says Nick Edwards, chief executive and co-founder of Boomtrain.

Boomtrain measures its own consumer satisfaction on a quarterly basis. But if a company has a huge consumer transaction volume, say Amazon, it can measure on a daily or a weekly basis, according to Edwards.

Aside from assessing the overall consumer satisfaction, email can help bring unhappy consumers back, especially those passively upset ones who historically open emails but all of a sudden stop engaging with a brand.

In that case, brands can conduct re-engagement campaigns by either sending push notifications or customizing emails such as “We Miss You, (Read more...) or exclusive deals.

“Dedicated emails that trigger exclusive activities and predict consumer happiness are very effective at re-engaging the customer and bringing them back to the brand. In doing so, brands are not treating every consumer the same,” says Edwards.

In terms of measurement, he adds that it should be based on both an individual basis and a cohort basis. A cohort could be associated with the time when someone first signed up for the service, or it could be based on other attributes such as location and age.

When it comes to specific metrics, marketers should not overlook open rate, click-through-rate and engagement rate. But more importantly, they should keep an eye on downstream metrics such as time on site, return frequency, and the purchase size if e-commerce brand.

Remember, email is just one entry point so it has to be taken holistically to an overall consumer experience.

“It’s a mistake if marketers measure email customer care in a silo instead of having a comprehensive view of what’s going on,” says Edwards.

Social media

Compared to email, social media is a one-to-many channel rather than one-to-one. Social messages are less likely to be customized for individual followers but the advantage of social is that brands can publicly showcase their commitment to customer service and how helpful they are.

For example, Royal Dutch Airlines has established a dedicated customer service team on Twitter 24/7.

It’s hard to measure social customer care because it usually requires fairly robust teams fully dedicated to that side of the business. In addition, a lot of legalities and red tape could come to play in responding to customer satisfaction issues on social.

While Nick Hoppe, vice president of strategic marketing at Movement Strategy, says that his agency decided to shy away from handling customer satisfaction for its clients due to the above reasons, it does provide guidance when brands aren’t necessarily handling this aspect of social as best as they can.

Based on his experience, Hoppe believes that what all brands should be doing is measuring semantic context on social.

“For the brands we work with audience sentiment is a very important measure of success on our part and often an important KPI in campaigns that we run,” he says.

In these cases, Hoppe’s team always asks the following questions:

• Are they responding with personal messages or using canned content?
• Is the content being well received?
• Are they quick to respond or is it taking several days?
• Are they responding to most people or are some people having to message them multiple times before they get an answer?

All of the above are indicators used to identify how a brand’s social customer care can be improved.

In a nutshell

No matter which channel you choose, you should measure through both quantifiable metrics qualitative feedback.

And when you assess your customer service, you need to look beyond regular metrics like open rate, click-through-rate and engagement rate in email, as well as likes and shares on social.

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