10 Ways to Measure Social Customer Service

What are the ten best ways of measuring social customer service?

We asked three experts – and here’s what they said.

Ever since we decided it was a cost-centre, rather than an asset to be exploited, customer service has been awash with metrics. It is one of the most tightly measured departments in any large brand – with phone-calls timed to the second and response times scrutinised daily. Blending this with social media, where metrics are frequently absent or meaningless, is therefore not any easy task.

Never one to be daunted, I’ve asked a team of genuine social customer service pioneers to join me for an exploration of social customer service metrics.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share our initial notes on the theme of ’10 Ways to Measure Social Customer Service’ – as there are some really useful tasters to whet your appetite, or anger you, depending on your beliefs. I’d welcome your input on this list here, or via questions during the webinar.

Measuring impact

• Number and percentage of posts responded to – Often used as a headline to batter companies (‘only x% of Facebook questions responded to’)
• ‘Time to answer’ (TTA)’ or ‘Time to resolution’
• Deflection (or 1:1 contact reduction) – Offers measurement of impact on traditional channels like phone/email/forums.
• ‘Direct contacts versus listening volume’ and ‘relevance of listened volume’
• Thread depth – including ‘First Post Resolution’ and ‘channel redirection’
• ‘Customer effort’ – i.e. how much hassle a customer goes through to get their issue resolved.
• ‘Sales through social service’ and ‘prevention of returns or cart abandonment’ – Both a measure of ROI and quality of response

Measuring customer satisfaction

• Positive/Negative sentiment – Perhaps a more effective measure of success than for other Departments, e.g. marketing
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – A traditional PR measurement tool to discover ‘likelihood to recommend’
• ‘Gratitude Index’ on external channels like Twitter/Facebook – Much favoured by Jerome Pineau (I’ll ask why in the webinar)

Measuring efficiency

• Percentage of enquiries managed per channel – An indication of the success (or opportunity) of service on each social channel
• Average handling time – To be compared with non-social channels
• Average conversation thread depth – Perhaps an indication of agent efficiency

Measuring culture

• Employee engagement level – How involved are your employees in service?