Being asked to prove return on investment (ROI) is something every social media professional is familiar with. But not every organization is able to attribute financial transactions directly to social media.
Businesses without an ecommerce presence, for example, benefit from social media in ways that are less directly tied to revenue but equally as valuable. And if your primary use case for social media is providing customer service, then the idea of “ROI” is typically more about cost savings than it is about attributing a direct increase in revenue from social activity.
Regardless, it’s important to quantifiably prove the value of your work. In this post, we’ll break down one way of measuring the ROI of social customer service.
1. Know your objectives
Customer service is a broad concept, so you need to narrow down clear objectives for exactly what you’re aiming to achieve on social. For example, you may want to:
- Improve your customer satisfaction or net promoter score (NPS)
- Improve your first response time or average response time
- Decrease your average handling time of customer service issues
- Deflect inbound requests from other channels
Once you’ve defined exactly what your social customer service objectives are, you’ll be better equipped to prove whether or not you’re achieving success.
You’ll need specific metrics and calculations to prove the ROI of these different objectives, but we’re going to focus on one specific objective: deflecting inbound requests to other channels. The hypothesis here is that using social media to quickly resolve issues for your customers prevents those requests from coming into more costly customer service channels like phone or email, thus saving your business money.
2. Collect key data points
To quantifiably measure how much money social customer service is saving your business, you’ll need to know the following things:
A: The number of requests resolved on social media. If you’re using a tool like Hootsuite, this can easily be tracked by tagging inbound and outbound messages that are customer service requests.
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