Managing Customer Care During Viral SpikesHOW TO PROTECT YOUR BRAND AND MAINTAIN CRITICAL

SLAS DURING A SOCIAL MEDIA CRISIS

Introduction

The making of a crisis

Crisis fallout

Response time: the SLA that matters

How to meet response time SLAs during a crisis

Prepare for the next crisis

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Contents

Khoros delivers authentic digital customer experiences at scale for the world’s biggest brands. Comprising Social Media Management and Communities, the Khoros engagement platform enables brands to manage multiple digital touchpoints, facilitate millions of conversations, and drive smarter decisions through data — connecting customers, content, and conversations at the right digital moment.

Khoros.com | © Khoros Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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An excellent customer experience begins with the successful management of logistically complex digital care — but this is difficult enough on a good day. When disruption or unexpected events occur, care management can become even more complex: your customers’ reactions can flood social media. Negative comments, and in particular social amplification and the phenomenon of “piling on” can quickly wreak havoc on your brand’s reputation and the business. The digital care team’s ability to respond quickly and accurately during crisis-induced volume spikes — while still meeting expected service level agreement (SLA) response times for normal interactions — is therefore critical to protecting your business and the customer experience.

In what follows, we’ll explore how your team can continually deliver excellent customer experiences in a social media-obsessed world. We’ll focus on how brand reputation can be negatively impacted by response delays to routine social media communications and on the subsequent impact on customer sentiment.

Crises can and do happen regularly, perhaps more often than we realize. While we might think of a crisis as a major catastrophe — a bank failing, an aircraft incident, a major telecom outage — these are actually disasters, not crises, and mature industries have established disaster plans in place already. For our digital care purposes, a “crisis” can be defined as an event that overwhelms your company’s established digital care process and thereby threatens SLAs: think “denial of service attack.”

In an age of smartphone-carrying, video-enabled customers, digital crises actually occur rather frequently. Why? Consumer-facing brands are continuously exposed to risk by unforeseen events:

Introduction

service disruptions, weather, political or national security threats, and operational issues, to name a few. Disruptions like these drive additional service cost and place an added load on all customer service channels — a load that can stretch response times and similar critical metrics into the customer experience danger zone. Customers are now accustomed to using the power of their voice via social media to interact with brands, and social media is perceived, for better or worse, as the fastest way to communicate with brands. Simply put, when trouble happens, the social web lights up.

Ultimately, customer experience reigns supreme — in fact, executives in a wide range of industries have deemed it the final competitive frontier. Digital is at the forefront of care, and is most important in maintaining positive customer sentiment and improving negative sentiment in the highly visible social channels. Yet, too many businesses still struggle when a social media crisis occurs, often from the sheer volume of inbound customer requests and comments. The challenge brands face, aside from the event itself, is protecting against damage caused by the erosion of SLAs.

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Khoros examined the relationship between social traffic load management — the kinds of loads that can challenge even the best customer care teams — and how likely brands were to increase customer happiness during a customer/agent interaction as a function of the dynamic traffic load facing agents. In other words, we wanted to uncover the impact of rising social media traffic on customer happiness as delays in response increased.

We explored the following questions:

• Does a rapid rise in social media posts relevant to the brand challenge the delivery of excellent customer experience? (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

• Is it possible that social media spikes may increase social service disruptions, creating even more exposure to business operations?

• What is the impact on customer experience and happiness when social agent response times grow increasingly long (from a few minutes to an hour or more)?

• What happens when customers not impacted directly by the disaster experience delays because agents are overwhelmed?

What we uncovered led to a way to monitor and control the impact of a crisis on customer experience. Rather than focusing on the actual crisis drivers (which might not affect all customers, and in any event are generally handled by the disaster response team), we looked at the ongoing management of inquiries from customers outside the disaster, and at ways to ensure continued excellent digital care to those customers.

In summary, by managing a crisis and preventing traffic spill-over into ordinary operations, customer experience standards can be maintained throughout a crisis. While operational issues can and will introduce swings in social traffic load that challenge established response time performance standards (SLAs), there are methods and best practices that social teams can use to prepare for crisis events before the crisis occurs. Ultimately, this planning and preparation matters. Managing social service in the face of a crisis is now a required operations capability that contributes to an excellent customer experience.

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The making of a crisis

In establishing a policy or process related to crisis management for digital care purposes, the first requirement is to be clear about which crisis you are addressing: as we defined above, in this whitepaper a crisis is defined not in terms of the external event (for example, adverse weather), but rather in terms of the resulting impact on business operations in general and digital care in particular. Obviously the driver of the crisis needs to be addressed, and it generally is, for example by your crisis response or PR team. Our focus is on the load increase on digital care and the resultant secondary crisis if service levels begin to deteriorate.

A social media crisis happens when an event (either positive or negative) relevant to the business drives a significant increase in brand-related conversations on social channels. In other words, something happens, word spreads, and people talk about it on social media, dramatically increasing the load on customer service.

Look beyond the incident

There are two distinct actions that social customer service teams must prepare for:

1. Response to the actual events and the directly impacted customers

2. Management of additional event-driven social traffic that threatens SLAs and degrades the customer experience across the wider customer base

While the first action captures the immediate attention of the brand’s communications team, it’s the second action that digital care teams must prepare for ahead of time.

Spot a crisis before it becomes one: look for social coalitions

Social media coalitions — spontaneous alignments of individuals around a particular issue — can predict a social media crisis. The formation of coalitions is a precursor of viral uptake: as people begin to sense that they are “all in this together” the phenomenon of piling on develops.

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Pay attention to claims of social injustice or personal offense sentiment

Social web crises affect all major industries. In this whitepaper we focus on airlines. Airlines are well understood as a business, in the news frequently for issues both positive and negative that impact customer experience, and they are logistically complex. In this sense, airlines provide an ideal deep-dive opportunity to discover crisis drivers and management best practices that can be applied widely. In reviewing crises ranging from aircraft incidents to operational blunders to policy implementations resulting in adverse social reactions, an interesting observation arose: while catastrophic incidents attributable to the known hazards of the industry itself (in this case, air travel) certainly generate both mainstream media and social media conversation, incidents appearing to customers as a perceived social injustice or personal offense generated social impact far greater than corresponding mainstream media impact. This central finding is independent of the business itself: social media crises have occurred in the past year, and will just as likely occur in the next one, for airlines, banks, telcos, retailers, tech companies, and more. Now is a great time to dig in and get prepared.

Social channels are, by design, a breeding ground for the widespread expression of pent-up societal angst. Again, this is an industry-independent finding, and it’s significant for social media team managers (and operational managers responsible for customer experience): the perception of impropriety and/or injustice can drive extremely high levels of conversation on social channels. There is therefore the distinct possibility that a social media crisis may emerge from what appears to be relatively ordinary (if adverse) events — events that may not immediately command the attention they warrant from your social care or communications teams. The points to consider here are public perception and how sentiment plays out as the issue evolves.

While social service teams may not always be able to predict how the public will respond, with the right technology they can spot early warning signs that allow time to proactively move into crisis response mode. A rapid rise in inbound social posts referencing the brand and the presence and subsequent detection of judgmental terms or phrases, for example, may indicate a possible viral event that can threaten established response SLAs and drive down customer happiness. Keep in mind that the social media response can far exceed the perceived threat level of the causal event and then spread, impacting the entire customer base. In fact, we observed this very pattern in actual events we examined.

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The adjacent chart shows an example of the selective social amplification phenomenon: for MH370 (a catastrophic aircraft incident) there was significant coverage in both mainstream news media and social media, as expected. But by comparison, three recent social media crises — UA3411, UA215, and DL2582 — created significantly more social media relative to traditional than that associated with MH370, and considerably less mainstream news. The reasons why are important to understand.

In the social media crises associated with the non-catastrophic events, the mainstream coverage was relatively smaller and lasted for a shorter period of time than the social response, which by all accounts was much larger than expected. These events, in comparison with the catastrophic MH370 event — in which an actual aircraft was lost — demonstrate the real possibility that a social media crisis can have significant impact on a digital care team without the driving event making major headlines.

What does this mean for the business?

An unexpected rise in social media traffic to the customer service team can result in the erosion of performance standards, which can negatively impact the customer experience. With the crisis-related rise in conversation levels can come a full-scale social media denial of service attack, an increase in inbound social posts severe enough to cause the customer service team to begin to miss engagement SLAs (e.g., response time) for customers not associated with the crisis. At its worst, a rapid and sustained rise can result in the total failure of the digital care team’s ability to respond.

So, it’s clear that recognized catastrophic incidents generate high levels of mainstream media and social media traffic. And in response, most brands have comprehensive policies and established processes for managing communication around these events. No news there. But social media crises arising out of seemingly ordinary events can catch PR or established crisis response teams off guard and are therefore a potential threat to operational performance. Social media crises can cause a degradation of agent response time which can lead to a negative customer experience for potentially vocal customers who are otherwise not associated with the event.

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Crisis fallout

Crisis conditions, left unchecked, negatively impact business operations and results. The cost of the crisis from the perspective of digital care operations is measurable: for example, SLAs, set according to business objectives, have a quantifiable value. Deviation from established SLAs therefore also has a quantifiable value.

What is the business impact?

Brand damage.

Often at the top of the list as justification for crisis mitigation, reputation damage means “as a result of this event, people think measurably less of the brand than they did prior to the event.” Whether the event itself or the after effect of the event (such as response delay due to high levels of traffic) is the cause, the results can include disappointment or missed expectations. In turn, this disappointment can cause a current or prospective customer to reconsider his or her loyalty to the brand. Brand value is certainly quantifiable, and so any decrease in value as a result of a specific event (or series of events) can be quantified as well. Quantifying brand value and any change in value as a result of a crisis is important because it sets up the determination of ROI with regard to expenditure related to planning and preparing for crisis response and avoidance efforts.

Deviation from operational SLAs in association with or as a result of a crisis introduces collateral damage that can result in a degraded customer experience, lost business, and additional expenses. Failing to address day-to-day customer requests in a timely manner because the customer engagement team is over tasked by the immediate crisis can result in lost revenue as disaffected customers choose other market options. On the revenue side, customer loyalty can be fleeting: after one bad experience, 86 percent of American adults are willing to switch to another airline and pay more for better service, a finding that is similarly borne out across most industries. And on the expense side, having to pay overtime in order to bring operations back within SLA range has an immediate, quantifiable economic cost. It’s therefore essential to include a reasoned, quantitative assessment of management costs as a part of crisis management planning.

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Response time: the SLA that matters

When digital care teams are hit with high volumes of inbound posts during a social media crisis and their ability to meet response time SLAs deteriorates, the wider customer base is left waiting, which leads to more unhappy customers and a secondary social media crisis, all of which puts the business at risk.

Missing response time SLAs matters. While customers may understand (at some level) that a critical event has occurred, they still expect to be heard and to receive prompt responses and resolutions to their problems. Prompt response times for all customers during a crisis are therefore critical for the management and containment of negative outcomes.

In a Khoros analysis of response time and sentiment conversion across leading brands, we studied the relationship between customer happiness and agent response time, finding a negative correlation between slower response times and customer happiness. Of course, correlation is not causation: the data could simply imply that unhappy customers get slower service, possibly because their problems are more complex. So, we looked at customer sentiment after the agent approached the customer, essentially to investigate the change in sentiment after the customer experienced a delay in response time. In this examination, the slower the agent response time, the unhappier the customer. Naturally, customers do not like to wait and often feel put-off when this happens.

From the perspective of social customer service and resultant customer experience, there is a clear motive to maintain established response time SLAs during a crisis. Failure to do so will generate a second crisis of its own by the deterioration of customer happiness across a larger customer segment than those directly impacted by the crisis.

Monitoring and maintaining agent response time SLAs is key to managing and mitigating a social media crisis.

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How to meet response time SLAs during a crisis

Preparing for a crisis means, first and foremost, recognizing that crises will occur as a result of major, unfortunate events. The good news is that most brands have teams and processes in place to manage the first wave of a crisis. But what about the secondary crisis that can result from a rise in traffic? Here are some planning steps to help determine the costs of social crises.

Assess possible impact

Crisis-related impact can be measured as a function of the deviation from SLAs, via:

1. Direct costs, including overtime labor, and indirect costs, including customer abandonment

2. The cost of public relations associated with the management of the external event along with the impact to digital care SLAs given the traffic rise following the crisis

3. Measurable change to NPS or other established measures of brand value, in particular for the unaffected customers caught up in any follow-on delays

Critical steps during a crisis

As the digital care team is gaining control of the primary crisis event, traffic may be building on social channels. For social media crises that originate on the web, the challenge includes recognizing the crisis quickly and then dynamically reconfiguring the care team’s workflow, routing, and prioritization.

Live crisis response begins by identifying the type of crisis and the underlying drivers: is this a viral crisis associated with a single event, or a steady (slow-burn) reaction to an ongoing policy or other business conditions? The first step is to quickly identify the type of crisis.

Differentiate a fast-rise vs slow-burn crisis

Viral crises — driven typically by a single, isolated event and amplified by celebrity or influencer involvement — require a quick assessment and targeted response. Coordination between engagement and response teams (e.g., customer service) and PR is essential. The challenge: remove the heat and contain the boil-over.

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Managing a viral crisis requires two essential technology capabilities — trend monitoring and alarms — as well as the ability to react backwards to retroactively take control of the traffic spike after the fact and isolate it. By isolating the spike, the crisis traffic is segregated from day-to-day conversations, allowing the customer service team to continue normal operations. Crisis-related conversations can then be redirected for specific handling.

Managing a slow-burn event requires a different engagement and management strategy. If it took a year to boil over, the issue is not going to be resolved in a day. Slow-burn events often stem from business-based long-standing policies that occasionally irritate customers. Over time, that irritation adds up. Like fast-rise events, they can drive inbound traffic to levels that ultimately jeopardize SLAs. When managing this type of crisis, the combination of longer-term trend analysis and a specific outreach effort including via social media publishing when appropriate and dynamic prioritization and routing can be very effective.

For both types of crisis, dynamic routing and prioritization capabilities are essential, as they allow the crisis to be isolated, enabling the parallel efforts of a dedicated crisis team while social agents focus on day-to-day operations and meet established response time SLAs for the wider customer base. Dynamic routing provides the ability to shift crisis-related conversations to alternate resources on-the-fly. Dynamic prioritization provides the ability to re-prioritize the crisis-related conversations lower in the day-to-day agent workflow while the crisis team takes lead.

Note that neither of these actions actually mitigates the cause of the crisis. Rather, these management strategies are intended to ensure that day-to-day digital care operations are not negatively impacted. By shifting traffic away from an engagement team, performance within SLAs can be maintained, independent of the crisis. Of course, the events driving the crisis must still be addressed.

To successfully implement this strategy, it’s necessary to plan and prepare in advance to have a crisis engagement team alongside day-to-day teams operating on a digital experience management platform that can provide the dynamic routing and prioritization, retroactive crisis management, and throughput capacity to handle spikes during a crisis.

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Post-crisis: measure and learn

Following a crisis, new opportunities emerge, including the ability to refine your assessment techniques and learn from the event. To do so, you’ll have to take quantitative stock of what happened and apply those learnings to future operations.

Incoming post volume vs SLA deviation

Assessing the impact on social and digital customer experience teams requires quantifying the impact to established performance SLAs — including time for agent response (TAR) — and then examining the root causes of any SLA deviation. This stands in contrast to both after the fact brand impact analysis and the all too common analyses that focuses on incoming post volume. This distinction matters: brands cannot control the incoming message flow yet it’s often this metric — flow — rather than SLA deviation that is the primary focus of crisis evaluation.

Inbound social media traffic is driven by reaction to external events. Brands may be able to control the event — for example, implementing or not implementing a specific policy. And the brand can also control its ability to manage inbound traffic, for example, by choosing what to listen for or by considering the need to scale when designing a customer engagement platform. These are all in control of the brand, and all will materially impact the ability to manage a crisis. But no one controls the inbound flow; this is purely a function of social media response.

The crisis itself is a different matter. Once the conversations start, it’s game on. Public relations, customer service and other communications functions can guide, mitigate, and quell, but once a crisis begins on social media the conversation takes on a life of its own. It’s this aspect that drives the need for the SLA analysis rather than a focus on traffic volume. Simply put, measure the things you can control, and take note of the range and dynamics of everything else. Plan for that load, and then measure and plan your ability to maintain SLAs within that estimated load.

What can be done differently next time?

Quantitative SLA-based analysis leads directly into the second post-crisis opportunity: learning. To prepare for the next crisis, your brand should evaluate the following:

• Was the customer service team within SLA range throughout the entire event?

• Were they able to properly handle questions across the entire customer base?

• If not, why? Platform meltdown? Or difficulty finding the right answers and getting this information to those customers experiencing the crisis?

99%TAR SLA

During a crisis, you can’t control message flow, but you can focus on minimizing deviation from TAR SLA.

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One of the more interesting aspects of post-crisis analysis is understanding the rise and peak of the crisis-related traffic and linking this to the points at which performance against SLAs was jeopardized or missed. Was the reaction to the underlying event characterized by a viral rise or by a slow-burn that went undetected until it became unmanageable?

Understanding when SLA deviation occurred helps your team learn and prepare for next time; viral events are spotted via real-time alerts and brought under control by retroactive recovery processes that bring with it the need to go back in time, identify and isolate abnormal (crisis) traffic and segregate this from non-crisis traffic. This enables the continuation of day to day operation (remaining within SLAs even if at degraded levels) while a crisis team manages the present event, separately.

For slow-burn events, the post-crisis learning is in the identification of indicative metadata, feeding that data back into real-time trending analysis so that as these slow-burn events develop, the appropriate resources can be dispatched early in the process, preventing the development of the crisis the next time around.

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Planning for and preparing for the next social media crisis involves understanding how to spot an impending crisis, identifying the type of crisis you have on your hands, having the technology and people in place to isolate the crisis, and the ability to dynamically route and prioritize crisis-related inbound posts so that response time SLAs can be maintained for the wider customer base during the crisis. The objective with all types of social media crisis is to prevent a secondary social media crisis and adverse impact to the brand.

Make no mistake, no brand is immune to a crisis. But you can be prepared.

Prepare for the next crisis

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About the Author, Dave Evans Dave is the VP of Social Strategy at Khoros, where he leads the Messaging and Brand Protection programs. Dave has worked in social technology consulting and development around the world and is the author of the best-selling books Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day and Social Customer Experience: Engage and Retain Customers through Social Media. Dave is a frequent keynoter on strategies and trends in digital customer experience.

Khoros is the leading customer engagement platform built to turn siloed knowledge into enterprise value, and customers into contributors. By connecting consumer insights across all departments, Khoros gives companies the ability to run their business with their customers, anticipating their needs and accelerating sales, loyalty, and innovation.

With 2,000+ customers, including 52 of the Interbrand 100, and ten offices globally, Khoros powers approximately 500 million digital interactions every day. From social media to online communities and messaging to digital customer care, Khoros helps companies authentically connect with customers throughout their journey. Reach out to us today to see how we can help your brand connect with customers to create customers for life.

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