An estimated 70,000 cloud computing stakeholders tomorrow will descend on San Francisco for the biggest industry event of the year-Dreamforce 2012. The event features more than 750 sessions, but that's not where you'll find one of the most unique educational experiences.
In the middle of the expo floor, attendees will discover a huge "Salesforce Service Cloud Call Center" manned by eight veteran support agents. There, visitors can watch and learn as they field requests from fellow Dreamforce attendees. Salesforce.com hosted a similar customer service demonstration center last year, but for 2012 it's all about social.
"I don't think there's any company out there that doesn't need to be thinking about [customer service through social]. I guarantee your customers are already using the channel, and they're probably already talking about your brand." - Fergus Griffin, senior vice president of solutions marketing for Salesforce.com.
The Salesforce Service Cloud Call Center will form a large circle with an observation lane running through the center. Large screens will show interactions in real time on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Chatter self-service social groups. The center will also be ringed by flashy statistics streams resembling stock exchange tickers.
Griffin tells me onlookers should be able to glean social customer service best practices by watching Salesforce.com's service experts in action. But to give people a taste of what they could learn from the center, he and another Dreamforce presenter shared a few tips with me in advance.
1. Post Publically First
Unlike phone customer support, social media gives customers a platform to distribute comments about your brand - good or bad - to an audience of millions.
"It's like troubleshooting in a coffee shop or bar. It's likely more people will hear about it and pull friends from across the room to listen. This can mean a bad experience is shared further, faster," says John Rote, Vice President of Customer Experience at Bonobos. He will sit on a social customer service panel this week at Dreamforce called "How Small Businesses Keep Up with the Velocity of Customer Service."
To mitigate this risk, Rote suggests companies always acknowledge the comment in social before taking the interaction to another channel. Salesforce Service Cloud Call Center observers will watch this happen in real time. If an attendee asks a highly technical question on Twitter, the agent might reply, "I'm emailing you now!" or "Here's a link to a Chatter discussion on this topic."
This approach publicly demonstrates that the company is listening and responds to everyone. If the interaction was taken straight to email, no one would know customer service addressed the problem.
2. Create Knowledge Bases with Hashtag
Last year during Dreamforce, most interactions across all service channels involved questions about where things were located, recommendations for events, and tips for getting around the conference. Hashtags allow customer service managers to instantly create a knowledge base for topics such as these.
During this year's event, Salesforce Service Cloud Call Center agents might hashtag common queries with things like #Dreamforcemaps, #Dreamforcefood or a more general tag like #Dreamforcehelp.
Then, if a Dreamforce visitor tweets, "Where's the closest restaurant?" the agent could respond "@UserName check out everyone's food recommendations by searching #Dreamforcefood!" When they search that hashtag, the visitor could scan through everyone's suggestions. This saves the agent time, while still providing a helpful personal response.
3. Prioritize Properly
One of the biggest challenges with providing customer service through social is dealing with the sheer volume of requests. Griffin said companies should have a well-defined strategy for prioritizing responses.
This should include ranking factors from social-a Klout score, for example-and customer history. A company might choose to respond first to longtime customers or those with a history of high-value purchases.
At the Salesforce Service Cloud Call Center, observers will see social mention identification and prioritization automated through Salesforce.com's Radian6 Social Hub. This system will troll the Web for #Dreamforce, @Dreamforce and Dreamforce mentions on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. These will instantly be turned into a service ticket and prioritized and routed to the appropriate social response agent.
Discover Your Social Brand Advocates
Customer service through social media is not just about providing another interaction channel in addition to phone, email or live chat. Bonobos found out through customer surveys that social media support engaged customers who might never have sent their question otherwise. These customers might not only have purchased your product, but have the potential to become brand ambassadors.
"The thing that was really amazing to us was 3-4 months after [implementing our social customer service strategy], we found out that most of those customers identified never would have reached out to us if they weren't able to do it over Facebook or Twitter," Rote says.
Let us know what you learn from the Salesforce Service Cloud Call Center this year. Comment here or share your favorite image with Software Advice at @CRMAdvice on Twitter.