Over the last few months I’ve had a chance to create a social media customer service strategy for a Ketchum client. We directly supported their audience with any issues they might have had with an application on the client’s website.
I wanted to share a few tips and processes we created along the way to ensure that our 12 hours/day monitoring M-F (and additional hours on Saturday) ran smoothly. To get the team up and running we created:
- A clear schedule with monitoring hours
- Training materials for the monitoring team regarding the application
- A FAQ database for the monitoring team to use to answer questions
- A monitoring “diary” where one shift could leave notes for the next
- A social media protocol document which was signed off by the client.
It’s the last item that I think would be most useful to share with others in the social media community who are creating a social media customer service strategy as we found it very valuable to set expectations ahead of time with the client regarding how we were going to support their social media monitoring efforts.
Our social media protocol document included the following sections:
1. Goals for the Social Media Platforms
2. Overall comment policy
Once approved, these were posted on the social media platforms.
3. Monitoring hours of operation
4. Proactive Outreach Activities (and what those activities entailed)
5. Responsive Outreach (and what those activities included)
This section is also where we addressed the time-frame for our team’s response to a social media question.
We also addressed the tone that should be used for the responses, and the structure of the content being used, and outlined how to handle responses that were based on client approved FAQ copy, or questions that needed specific answers (or a where a new FAQ needed to be created).
We also outlined how long the client had to create those responses and send them to us to be used.
6. Engagement Guidelines
In this section we outlined the three ways we would monitor content. We would either:
a) Moderate (accept or reject comments based on guidelines before they were posted – based on the platform)
b) Review the content and handle after they have been posted, or
c) Monitor – we would observe the comments for the purpose of gaining insights and identifying opportunities for response.
We then outlined examples of the various types of content (by color) and outlined exactly what happens with each color (red/orange/yellow/green) and how fast we would respond to each time of content.
7. Engagement Process
We outlined the “who does what” in what type of time frame for each type of content being managed on the social media handles.
8. Engagement Standards
This section outlined our standards for engagement: the tone, transparency, timeliness, accuracy, and our established policy on what should and shouldn’t be linked to in the responses.
9. Monitoring, Reporting and Evaluation.
This section outlined how we would use our broader social media monitoring (more than just the handles) to influence what actions are being taken on the handles, and outlined what type of social media profile growth we would track over time.
10. Social Media Points of Contact
This outlined who on each side was responsible for each piece of the social media management process.
11. Flow chart of social media responses by type
We also included the following chart for the client to see how each type of response would be handled:
It was a pretty comprehensive document, but it served us well over time and I hope that the outline helps you create a similar document for your next social media management engagement!