“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.” Einstein

Not too long time ago I had a question related to the use of some type of online service. The first thing I did – went to their online help. It took me a while to play with my search terms to finally get to an article that was somewhat related to what I was looking for. But… it did not contain clear instructions on how to solve my problem.

I immediately decided to use their real-time online chat. Well, the person who was on another side apparently was using the same knowledge base that I was searching in my step 1 of solution finding journey.

And then I had to move to step 3 – writing an email to that company’s support department describing the issue yet again. I did get a response back, but it was the same one that I already heard 2 times before. I responded. My response contained less than admirable words towards the support services of the company which product I was trying to use. Magic! My request got finally escalated! And I did hear back from THE expert. The one who understood my issue and helped me with the solution.

Just for the fun of it, I went back not too long time ago and checked the online knowledge base of that company to see if they have updated the solution I was trying to use with the data that helped me with resolving my issue. No, the content was still old, no updates.

Why I am telling you this story? You probably have dozens of the similar stories you can share with me. My main reason is … Social Media and all the hype around how great social media is for customer service support.

Your company’s social media service support will be as great as that knowledge base article that has not been updated for a long time.

Before you through more money and people on these new service/support social media channels make sure you have your back end systems and processes under control.

Here are some of the questions you need to address:

-         Do you have a process in place to analyze social media generated service/support requests:

• What was the root cause of the issue?
• Is there a solution in place in online Knowledge Base?
• Can that solution be easily located?
• Do you need to make changes to your product [UI, layout, flows, etc..] to avoid service/support questions in a first place?

-         People

• Do you train your service/support people to listen to incoming requests, or they are trained to follow their scripts?
• Do you train them to comment on why they think service/support request has been generated in a first place and suggest methods/solutions that could prevent similar type of problems to appear in a first place?

Instead of me re-writing everything that relates to Knowledge Management, I suggest you hire top notch Knowledge Management consultant who can look at your back end systems, processes and can advise you on how to set things up so 80% of most commonly asked questions can be solved online using online help. And you can focus on those remaining 20% unique “hard” requests that most likely relate to unknown bugs and product functions that need to be developed…

Going back to where I started – with that problem that took over a week to solve and all the time and people that were involved in solving it… Nothing has changed. There is someone else who is going through the same process I went through not too long time ago now… Oh, I forgot to mention that I did check their online user forum – had the same issues – could not find the right discussion and when I did, there were no solution in place either.

So please, when you finally update Knowledge Base, go and find that discussion on user forum and post that solution as well! Thank You!

In my previous blog post I said that companies have to find ways to locate those amazing people who spend hours every day helping others in solving problems. In their spare time. And without pay! Yes companies, find those people, make them feel very special – they are saving you money, ok?

So who are they – these highly valuable, hard to find “answer” people?

Why do we need to worry about characteristics of these “answer” people? Because if we know what we are looking for we might be able to find them. And we know by now that we need to find them. We need to help them if needed, support them, reward them, and make sure people know about them.

Here is my sample list of “answer” people attributes:

-         on Twitter – lots of replies; less posts and RT;

-         consistent presence – few hours a day;

-         consistent level of responses;

-         typically associated with very few areas – on Twitter – limited number of hashtags, everywhere else – tags, key words, etc…

Source: Marc Smith

Source: Marc Smith

You can see now “answer” people specific patterns you need to watch for doing your social networks analysis.

Your community will never be successful without these absolutely amazing dedicated “answer people”! Be nice to them!

What has changed in a community management space?

Before: companies were creating and managing communities:

Now: users are initiating service/support requests everywhere: on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. , forming their own service/support communities on multiple social networks:

Many companies are struggling with their social media service/support channels strategies.

Here are some lessons learned from Intuit and my thoughts:

-         Based on your products and services pick and prioritize service/support goals per social media channel. In Intuit case, #1 priority is still the internally created communities with millions of users and hundreds of thousands of service requests. The service response goal for Intuit for this channel is 75%. The second most important service/support channel for Intuit is Amazon with target response rate of 100%, etc..

-         Users do want to get support on the same channel they initiated their request at – attempts by Intuit to channel these requests to a special community place have failed;

-         Users trust more their peers for service/support questions;

-         There are many people [experts in your product] out there who will be more than happy to assist others – in Intuit case, they rely almost 100% on their super users to provide Twitter-based technical support;

-         Use community management methodology for social media initiated support communities. Recognize and award most useful users. Kira from Intuit has mentioned about the special Twitter list Intuit has created with the names of the most helpful Twitter-based Intuit users.

Questions to consider:

-         Do you know whether the same gurus who are providing the most helpful support on your internally managed communities are also providing support across social networking channels?

-         Who are the most helpful service/support gurus for your products/services per social networking channel?

-         How can you connect all the dots? How can you make sure people who can provide online support via social networking channels can connect to the ones who need help?

Few weeks ago I did a post on Social Networks Analysis. It was pretty clear from the mentioned diagram that this specific brand did not create twitter-based communities – too many disconnected dots. “Answer” people could not be found anywhere on this graph… Now I think there is a need to create integrated cross-channel communities graph in addition to per-channel social networking diagram to get a better understanding of all the dynamics of all service/support channels. Companies need to come up with integrated service/support communities’ management framework. This will enable them to provide better customer service/support everywhere where the customers are at a lower cost.

Please share with your experiences running service/support operations on social networking channels. Also, make sure you follow our meetup – we have another great panel on The Future of Customer Service coming up on 1/12.

I posted videos from our previous meetups over here.