Webcare is more than customer service

Many organisations view online customer care or webcare as a form of service: a standardised way of answering complaints and questions of people who would have called or emailed. Of course, answering questions and complaints is the core of online customer service; however, the team could also have a signalling function. The so-called ‘webcare’ is your organisation’s ears and eyes. It is about reacting fast and adequately to stakeholders through online media and spokesmanship, engagement, marketing and sales.

Thus, webcare goes beyond simply responding to complaints and questions through Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp. It is about all online channels where consumers can express their opinions. The ‘why’ of webcare is no longer a discussion and is increasingly more often an integral part of digital customer contact. It has matured.

However, maturity does not automatically mean wisdom gained over the years. By that, we see that a broad application of webcare within many organisations is still in its infancy. Much too often, online customer service is simply an instrument used to refer to traditional customer contact channels. This guide looks at the optimal application of online customer service for organisations. We will discuss the most important channels, objectives, reporting, the organisation and the team, and their corresponding tasks.

Excellent webcare is fast, convenient and offers a little extra

Many organisations focus on the customer and use online and offline media monitoring to gain insight into relevant messages from social networks, news sites and review sites. Therefore, it is unsurprising that many webcare teams respond through social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger or review sites such as Trustpilot. Deciding through which channels your service should be provided depends highly on the customer’s desires, your chosen strategy, and the (technological) developments within the customer service landscape.

Webcare begins with listening. Do you signal questions and complaints through social media? Do your customers leave reviews about your brand or products? Are you mentioned on blogs and forums or in responses to news coverage? Join the conversation and respond to those messages!

‘Being active everywhere’ is not always the right choice. This requires tuning in with customer service, marketing, communication, and PR. Service ought to be embedded in the most important communication and marketing channels. Do ask yourself whether or not the channel of choice fits your organisation.

Critical success factors are fulfilling promises, excellent personal service, and a reasonable price. Moreover, they distinguish themselves by delivering speed and ease through digital service and going the extra mile by offering a bit more. This also highly determines the satisfaction of your customers. Choosing the proper channels depends not only on the customer but also on whether you can fulfil the desires and demands presented in terms of speed, convenience, and quality of the delivered solution.

Signalling of questions, complaints, buying intent and much more

Webcare has a signalling role. Social media monitoring makes it possible to signal questions and complaints pending an answer. However, it does not stop here. How about monitoring print media, like newspapers and magazines, or radio and TV broadcasts? It is wise to map when and where conversations occur about your brand, market, and competitors in written or spoken words.

Listening to understand what the (potential) customer means to learn from what went wrong is the basis of monitoring and webcare. Unfortunately, taking direct action is often missing, and the service process is only designed for reactive customer service. Meanwhile, customers increasingly want better, faster help and service through their preferred channels.

Everything begins with listening. Do you signal questions and complaints through social media? Do your customers leave reviews about your brand or products? Are you mentioned on blogs and forums or in responses to news coverage? Join the conversation and respond to those messages!

Shift of public communication to private channels

Questions to webcare teams are increasingly asked through private channels. This happens, for example, via live chat on the website, a special WhatsApp number for customer service or through Facebook Messenger. This trend leads to an increase in messages and raises additional questions, mainly due to the growing pressure that may negatively influence the speed and convenience of webcare.

Overall, webcare goes much beyond solely responding to complaints and questions via your Twitter and Facebook channels. It is about all online channels where consumers share their opinions. Determine which channels you should watch and choose which type of posts you will or will not respond to.

Again this year, Newcom Research’s research shows the latest developments in social media channels. While Facebook use continues to decrease in the Netherlands, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram use is growing.

Objectives of webcare

What would you like to achieve with the application of webcare? Did the team start with the idea of decreasing the workload on your call centre and focusing on cost reduction, or would you like to react better and faster to relevant messages? The power of webcare lies in helping out customers and delivering excellent service. When carried out adequately in a way that consumers value, you can tremendously limit the impact of a single complaint. By that, you prevent escalation and negative ‘word-of-mouth’. Secondly, you can boost positive stories and experiences surrounding your organisation. Social media is social. If you do your best, consumers will share this with friends and followers.

Reputation management

The added value of webcare goes much further than cost reduction. It influences your reputation! Consumers ask their questions more and more often through social media and messaging, but increasingly know where to place complaints for maximum exposure. It involves stakeholders who talk about you: on your social channels, online forums and external platforms. With the correct input of webcare, you are always on top of what is happening online.

Proactive service delivery

Solely responding to messages that are directed to you creates a lot of missed opportunities. The added value of responding proactively is presented in offering information or a helping hand, without asking customers to contact you. Using this, organisations can quickly handle the problem before it reaches an escalation phase. It can also turn a negative sentiment into a positive experience. A positive experience with webcare is easily shared and can get a large potential customer group with the viral character of social media.

Of all the conversations which take place on social media channels from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, more than a quarter are proactive. In the Customer Contact Centre, a cooperation between the Schiphol Group and Arvato Bertelsmann, a team of Social Media Specialists monitors coverage around Schiphol daily with the Spotler Engage tool. Aside from solving customer questions, they strive to welcome passengers by proactively engaging in personally relevant conversations.

Detecting points of improvement and leads

Reporting and analysis are essential when applying reactive or proactive webcare, as it is important to determine whether the agreed-upon KPIs have been achieved. Furthermore, you would like to measure the effect of communication and catch the latest tips for product improvement or even buying intent!

Webcare offers excellent opportunities to collect input for product improvement. Use your tool to collect and group user feedback to improve your product or service productively. In addition, you can also use such communities to actively ask for input.

Detect the buying intent of potential customers by searching for interesting messages within your sector using keywords. Which questions do they ask? Or is there a conversation presenting a need for your product so you can participate? By finding out what terms are being used in the messages of potential customers, you can actively monitor these terms and proactively contact them.

How to organise webcare

First and foremost, the basis needs to be clear and undisputed. Where do you place the webcare team? Which function profiles are required, and what should be the team’s goal? Next up are the details. What is the best set-up? How do you decide on the response time and service level? Finally, you determine how to measure customer satisfaction, and lastly, all of those agreements form your social media policy.

Where do you place webcare?

Smaller organisations often integrate care into other departments, such as customer service. Larger organisations usually have a dedicated webcare team or integrate their activities into communication departments. In this case, spokespersonship and corporate communication are closely related.

Doesn’t webcare primarily belong to customer service? Webcare activity mainly consists of answering customer questions and solving problems. It becomes clear when stakeholders express criticism on business management. These expressions must be monitored while pinpointing potential risks and, if needed, reported quickly to the communication department. Consequently, the response of webcare ought to be in line with the message you want to communicate as a business.

The profile of a webcare employee

Webcare is an extension of spokesmanship and PR. It is important to have employees who know the tricks of the trade. People who understand that a response on Facebook is also a corporate statement. Such a profile is often not the same as the preferred profile of customer service employees. Webcare is, in most cases, an application of one-to-many communication. Consider it as such and acknowledge that this requires a different approach than traditional customer service. A sufficient knowledge and skill are needed for the webcare team to help stakeholders.

A good webcare employee takes sufficient time to create a flexible and correct response. The quality of the answers increases when employees take the time to broaden their knowledge to grasp the person entirely, as well as the case and the situation. Has this customer contacted you before about the same problem? If possible, go the extra mile for this person. Perhaps you could help him differently? Such customer insights need to be documented in your webcare or CRM system to inform your colleagues about this situation sufficiently.

Determine the desired response time and measure the service level

A few years ago, people would get excited by the number of fans and followers on their accounts, but those days are over. The number is not that interesting. Interaction is the basis for online service, and a quick response is the norm for many organisations. Rarely does anyone like to wait (too long) for an answer. Measuring the degree of delivering good online service to your customers is much more interesting because good service is the new marketing!

Where needed, use real-time insights to direct the webcare team. Use a sample-based rating to ensure the quality per employee. Evaluate given answers on knowledge of product/service, formulation of the answer, and empathy towards the customer. Webcare agents who don’t use a “conversational human voice” in their answers influence the sentiment negatively.

Collect customer feedback through social media

Social media has developed into a full-fledged customer contact channel. Because of their growing importance, the need arises to know how customers experience contact through social media. Using online monitoring, larger organisations receive a lot of unfiltered feedback through social media. These messages contain negative as well as positive sentiments. Organisations cannot influence the subject, type, and frequency of feedback because they don’t actively ask for it.

By combining these different types of customer feedback, you gain insight into (structural) points of improvement for your organisation. It’s also important to compare customer contact channels (telephone, email, social media, chat) to create a 360-degree overview of your customers.

By using a good social media monitoring tool, the collection of said feedback and automatic and scalable measurement of customer happiness via social media becomes a reality. Social analytics reports are, therefore, extendable with a metric like NPS (Net Promoter Score). Next to insight into volume, sentiment, webcare activity and response time, it also determines the overall quality of webcare.

Form a social media or webcare policy

A clear webcare strategy is needed to optimise reputation management, service, and lead generation results. Part of the webcare strategy is a communication policy for clear communication, or a social media policy.

A social media policy adds value when agreements about communication through webcare have been made. Different answers to the same question create confusion, especially concerning a public conversation. A good policy determines when, where and whether a response is needed. It describes the preferred manner and tone of voice when responding. This leads to fewer surprises for both the webcare agent and the client. Think of how you want to communicate in case of:

• crises;
• regular questions;
• complaints;
• factual inaccuracies;
• compliments.