As the buzz around social customer service continues to crystalize into a real priority for many contact centers, enterprises are now scrambling to find potential options to meet that demand quickly. The idea of developing a custom solution from the ground up requires huge resources and lots of time – something that’s just not in the cards for most brands. To make matters worse, until recently, there hasn’t been an application built for social customer service that could also work with existing systems across the business. Fortunately, that’s where HelpSocial comes in.

Before you get too deep into a software tools discussion, here are 5 items you’ll want to vet thoroughly when thinking about scaling social customer service.

1. What customers are expecting from your support presence in social?

Go through the list of questions and issues brought up. What are the common topics? How often do the same topics come up?

2. Who else needs to be active in or available for social response?

Based on what you learned from the exercise above, aside from your general CSRs, who else needs to have access to Social in order to help with these questions? Product Specialists? The Billing Team? Sales? Recruiting

3. What tools do the teams that need to be involved use right now?

Just because you’re giving someone the ability to participate in social plans doesn’t necessarily mean you have to replace their tool – or give them a new tool to take up more space on their desktop. Very likely, the pieces of social data and the functions they’ll need to participate with can be built right into their current tool-set.   

4. What customer data those who currently monitor social channels need to make supporting customers easier?

Providing your CSR’s with contextual data will speed up response rates, deflect call volume and improve time to resolution and improve customer sentiment. Learning what data is helpful will give you insight into which tools and systems need to be connected.

5. What groups outside of marketing and social would like insight into certain pieces of the social customer journey within your business?

Social customer service isn’t just about helping customers in social media. It’s also about learning from their unsolicited, raw feedback so you can improve your products and customer impacting processes, which ultimately improves the customer experience. Think about which business units could move faster if they had real-time access to live customer opinions.