Often when we talk about social media in business we talk about “social media marketing” which is a term I dislike for various reasons -one reason being that it supposes it only lies in one department rather than an integral part of how we communicate with customers, employees, and stakeholders.

One area that should be part of the grand scheme when it comes to social media is customer service.  Today many companies are finding ways to connect with their customers directly via the web, often offering support and help. Since this is a focus in my work I wanted to highlight the subject on my blog.  Through my work I have had the opportunity to chat with many others that are using social media for support. I have learned a lot from them and want to share some of these conversations through a short series of interviews. My hope is that you will find this information helpful in building your online customer care communities.

In order to facilitate these posts I sent a series of questions to a few folks and they were kind enough to respond. The first interview is with Ben Hong, Senior Manager Technical Services, Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group at Logitech. Due to the number of questions I have broken this post into two posts. Part two will be published later this week.

Part One: Customer Care Online First Steps- Logitech with Ben Hong

Can you describe your career path that brought you to where you are today?

It has been one focused on creating the best possible experience for customers by implementing service innovations and managing for high performance.

How would you describe a typical work day?

Busy, busy and busy…so it usually starts even before I leave for the office by reading and responding to email, tweets and Facebook. When I arrive, I try meet with each member of my team individually to discuss projects/tasks and provide the team with feedback or direction.  The rest of the day is spent managing programs which normally involve participating or chairing meetings, preparing and delivering presentations, briefs and reports. For the last few months I have also been spending time throughout the day monitoring our discussion forums, Twitter, Facebook and Blogs. Putting into action our social media support program is what excites me about work these days.

What responsibilities fall into your department or team? Where does you team fall in the organizational structure ( eg. customer service? communication?)

My team and I lead social media, knowledge management, VoC and training initiatives within the Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group organizations of Logitech.

How many people work on your team?  What are you able to accomplish with this size team in the social space – e.g channels? quantity of daily responses?

My team is made up of two products specialists, curriculum designer, and various contractors that provide technical writing, training and video content.

• Blogs – We write one Tips and Tricks blog post each week for the corporate blog and respond to on average 2-3 comments each day.
• Customer Forums – We monitor customer forums from 20-30 responses per day for the team.
• Internal Forums – We monitor internal discussion forums for our customer care agents and respond daily to 10-20 posts per day.
• Twitter – We co-tweet with marketing/PR teams and respond to 2-5 customer care or technical support questions each day.
• Social Monitoring – We just acquired Radian6 as social monitoring tool. However, we have been using a variety of free tools to track blogs, twitter, product reviews and other social media. We typically report once a week on social media trends/buzz for our Harmony Remote Controls products.
• Videos – Currently creating prototype videos for publication on YouTube and Viddler. Our plan is to publish 1-2 videos per month.

Social Media plays a large part of your role, but typically people associate the use of Social Media with Marketing, what are the biggest benefits realized by your business due to your team’s participation in social media for customer service?

We are early on in our adoption of social media for customer service, month three. There are two early benefits to our participation in social media responding to and managing negative customer experiences, learning more about our customers through social monitoring. Our long term goals are tied to the mission of delivering an engaging online customer service experience.

How did you initially convince the business that engaging with customers via social channels for customer service was the right strategy?

It’s a work in-progress, but we asked to create an incubator team. Our chain of command from CMO to VP to Directors have all been extremely supportive and eager to see the program grow.

Generally, customers don’t care what department you work in when they connect online. Do you work closely with other internal departments to integrate social media communication efforts? If so, which ones?

Absolutely. We work closely with marketing, sales, PR, CX, QA and product/software engineering teams. Our marketing and PR social media programs are more mature and we have learned a lot by partnering with them.

There are many social channels where your customers will engage with each other – how do you decide which social spaces you will participate in?

Given where we are with the development of our program we have focused primarily on mass social media applications and networks. Social monitoring tools will help us to decide if and where we move next. For us it is critical to look before we leap.

As social channels grow, and customers come to expect businesses to respond online to their requests – there has been a lot of talk about scaling efforts. Is this a concern for your team? If it is how will you scale to meet the growing business? If not, why?

Yes, scale and resourcing is a critical part of our plan, which is why we have decided to take a measured approach to building out the program. Currently we have a small team, with a roadmap for adding resources.

How do you measure the success of your social media efforts?

Success is and will be tied to our corporate and departmental goals. So, NPS and cost will be key measures of our success.

Do you have KPIs for your team (for example time to response) if so can you share what these are and why they were chosen?

We are working on them.

Watch for part two…

In part two I ask Ben questions around the people, process and tools he is using to accomplish the work they are doing online for customer service.