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Have you been looking for an instruction manual that guides you through the trials and tribulations of implementing a social customer service strategy?

Look no further. Have I got a great book for you to read! I just finished Delivering Effective Social Customer Service: How to Redefine the Way You Manage Customer Experience and Your Corporate Reputation by Martin Hill-Wilson and Carolyn Blunt. Martin sent met the book a while back, and I’m excited that I finally had a chance to read it.

Martin and Carolyn do an excellent job of touching on a variety of topics to help you get on your way with developing and implementing your social customer service strategy. The book is an engaging read, and you’ll find yourself thanking them both for writing it all down in one place!

One of the things that I found extremely helpful in the book is the framework they propose to create a roadmap for how you will execute on your strategy. They present the framework as an assessment that includes 15 competencies to deliver effective social customer service. You rate each competency on three criteria. It’s a great resource and a smart exercise that you can do yourself or use with your team to begin the buy-in and alignment process.

The competencies include having…

1. A social customer service strategy that fits into a broader service strategy and social media strategy.
2. The right leadership and development model that optimizes our impact in social customer service.
3. An effective way of listening to social mentions of our brand and can accurately categorize those that need a response.
4. A level of integration between social and traditional that allows you to deliver the intended customer experience.
5. The right people on the bus, as a result of knowing how to recruit, train, and manage social customer service teams.
6. Alignment between social customer service competencies and traditional ones, e.g., culture, policy, infrastructure, SLAs, etc.
7. A platform and channel mix that works for our customers and the markets they are in.
8. A clearly mapped customer journey.
9. Access to relevant customer service knowledge and using socially-sourced knowledge effectively.
10. The ability to build and to access social interaction history.
11. A level of readiness for unexpected volumes of social traffic.
12. The right balance of metrics the reflect customer priorities and management priorities.
13. SLAs that outperform the competition.
14. An understanding of what works and doesn’t work on social channels, based on customer feedback.
15. The ability to learn from social interactions and track improvements.

I love that Martin and Carolyn go into some detail on each of the competencies, outlining why each one is important, issues and consequences of each, how to achieve quick wins, some follow-up action items, and a few additional tips. It’s very comprehensive yet not unachievable.

The book also includes a chapter on using Facebook for social customer service and another one on best practices for using Twitter. There’s also a great chapter on the legalities of social media, including a section on social media policies for your employees.

People don’t care how much you know, but they know how much you care by the way you listen. -Robert Conklin

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Online Communities: Help Your Customers Help Each Other The Leaky Bucket Syndrome 3 Ways to Use CRM Software to Enhance the Customer Experience How Social is Your Customer Service?