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In today’s fast-paced digital world, 89% of companies are prioritizing investments to enhance their social experience management within the next year. Learn how to stay ahead with insights from the ResultsCX and Nelson Hall 2024 White Paper on Social Experience Management. This comprehensive guide offers key insights and practical strategies to elevate your social experience management practices.
The Importance of Social Experience Management:
Social media plays a critical role in influencing customers and prospective customers for many B2C businesses. It now serves as an integral component of many companies’ sales and marketing strategies. The widespread global popularity of social media channels and the subsequent expansion of these platforms mean that social experience management now encompasses a vast range of pivotal company functions such as:
- Social listening to monitor brand sentiment.
- Digital reputation management for influencing and managing community conversations.
- Content moderation and community management to ensure compliance and a safe digital environment for customers.
- Direct selling through social media marketplaces such as Instagram and Facebook storefronts.
- Ensuring prompt response times and consistent brand tone of voice across social platforms.
- Appropriately leveraging social analytics and reporting to optimize campaign measurement and management.
- Effective online complaint handling to reduce customer attrition and increase loyalty.
These social media platforms are the preferred communication channel for a growing number of customers, offering a myriad of opportunities to increase company growth. As unveiled in our white paper, 93% of executives regard social experience management as highly important to their company’s future success.
Social Experience Management: Identifying Challenges and Solutions
Challenges:
During our research, we identified several industry-specific challenges and common challenges across various industries. Resource limitations are a key challenge, feeding into issues such as fragmented customer data, inconsistent engagement tactics, and content moderation. As social experience management grows as a practice, it becomes more specialized and subsequently more difficult to manage. The benefits of social experience management will be increasingly abundant for the brands that do it right.
Solutions:
ResultsCX has meticulously collated solutions to social experience challenges and conducts extensive annual research to meet emerging obstacles within the practice. Optimize resources to mitigate limitations by conducting resource allocation analysis. This enables the most appropriate spend of resources, aiding in combating challenges arising from limited resources.
Integrating social media and technology platforms consolidates fragmented customer data and coordinates inconsistent engagement tactics. Adopting a cross-functional team approach optimizes resources and provides consistency across engagement tactics. A social media handbook can ensure homogeneity in brand tone of voice, positioning, and engagement tactics throughout different teams.
The growing necessity for content moderation and the rapid increase in moderating volume have increased the difficulty of effectively conducting the process internally. This is partly why 72% of companies are involving third parties extensively to enhance their social experience management.
Leveraging GenAI for Enhanced Engagement
The recent introduction and advancements of generative AI have sparked significant interest in the CX community. Generative AI can respond naturally to human conversation and personalize customer workflows. For example, AI-powered chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants can respond accurately to basic customer inquiries.
Executives view GenAI as an effective tool to increase engagement and sales by making replies more customized and personal, while improving the speed and volume of responses handled.
Social Experience Management and GenAI: What Are The Benefits?
GenAI applications for CX are significant and likely to transform modern customer service. There are a plethora of benefits from effective implementation of GenAI into CX processes. GenAI is not a replacement for human service but a supplement to free up employee time for tasks requiring more critical thinking. Effective implementation of GenAI can lead to:
- Increased and consistent response times.
- Personalized interactions for mapped customer workflows.
- The ability to escalate queries to customer service reps based on complexity.
- Notable cost savings.
- Conducting customer sentiment analysis from customer interactions.
- Instant language translation, mitigating barriers to expansion.
- Increased customer engagement levels.
Social Experience Management: Critical Success Factors
Through substantial research, we’ve identified five critical success factors for social experience management outlined below.
- Objective Prioritization: Focus on objectives such as driving sales growth, protecting brand value, increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of customer service, and providing analytics for optimized marketing and improved targeting.
- Governance: Develop a social media playbook for consistent policy application, implement metrics for key business KPIs, standardize social experience management across teams, analyze in real-time to address performance shortfalls, and develop a crisis management strategy.
- Optimize the Mix of People and Automation Technologies: Promote capable call center agents to the social media team and balance human and balance human and AI-driven interactions to maximize efficiency while maintaining a personal touch.
- Maximizing sales & customer retention: Use a social experience management team to convert digital traffic into sales. Target disgruntled customers of competitors. Develop strong intervention strategies for addressing negative content. Apply GenAI to customize content across multiple resources and make responses faster, more personal, and more easily understood.
- Capabilities to consider when choosing third parties: When researching third parties an ideal candidate will be adept at reimagining your social experience and developing social experience management playbooks. They’ll have deep expertise in data analytics and the ability to apply GenAI to social experience management. They will immediately address your key business and social media metrics. Combined call center and social experience management services is essential. As is effective recruitment, training, and retention of social media agents. Identify services which offer extended hours of coverage and an increased proportion of social media posts covered as well as offshoring to enhance the cost-effectiveness of social experience management. Identify these capabilities and service features to optimize your SEM investment.
Reimagine Social Media CX
