Social customer service metrics

Selecting the most relevant Social Customer Care metrics

As I read through the different types of social media care metrics, how they should be interpreted, and how they relate to ROI, I was struck by one thought: who do these measures benefit?

So, I put together a quick table drawing the different metrics, categories and ROI together. The image is a bit blurry, but if you click on the table you can see where I take the different metrics, categories and ROI from the original article.

The next column is ‘Company benefit’, followed by ‘Customer benefit’, followed lastly by ‘Will this resolve the customer’s issue’.

My two observations are:

• 1. Quality is one of the categories that Walter Van Norden (Telus) proposes. Interestingly, there are no metrics for Quality.
• 2. It is obvious from the last three columns – columns that I have added – that these metrics only benefit the company. They address issues of process efficiency and customer satisfaction, but do not actually address whether or not a customers issue has been resolved.

A lot of the metrics reflect that focus on processes, and this is an outdated way to look at something. You still need to understand the processes but now experiential metrics are more important. So now you should see a different type of metric, in addition to the process metrics, that put the resolution or the issue first. You still need to understand the processes but now you need more experiential type of metrics coming in…’

I wrote a post the other day about a response to a Tweet I came across from @NHSDirect – @NHSDirect and empathy? Or is it me?

The post got me thinking about empathy and tone of voice, and it was one of the first times that I started to realise and think about the importance of tone of voice.

Is this one of the emerging metrics we need to start thinking about in terms of social customer care? I’m wondering what some of the others are? Is this more about working through the convergence of marketing, PR and customer service metrics? No matter what, I’m wondering whether we’ll still end up overlooking measuring whether a customer’s issue has been resolved…