An ROI for Social Media Engagement

Social Shake-Up Presentation

The following contains the slides from our recent Social Shake Up presentation. I’ve included both the slides and some speaking notes to help clarify specific point.

Why a Customer Based Valuation Doesn’t Work:

We all want to be able to calculate a value for every customer that reaches out to us via social media. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that’s possible. There are multiple reasons why this is the case, and I’ll cover these in the next few slides. However, if a vendor tells you that they’re able to capture a comprehensive value model for each customer you interact with, trust that they’re wrong.

Your Metrics Baseline:

What you’re reporting on today most likely is based on where your social engagement organization was birthed from. If your team originated within your companies Marketing or Public Relations groups, you most likely rely heavily on tradition metrics from those fields. However, if you started out as part of a call center group then you most likely rely on call center metrics like Average Handle Time. It’s a good idea to be introspective to understand where you started, and where you might need to grow.

It Doesn’t All Mesh:

Click to Enlarge

This is where the bad news starts. There are a ton of metrics across social media. However, they don’t all act the same, and they don’t all interact with each other. Before you do anything else, you need to understand the nuances involved in social reporting.

• Metric Types: Social media platforms have to unique types of reporting, and they are mutually exclusive. The major difference between these two metric categories is:
  • Post Based Metrics (Learn More): Reporting for post based metrics is based on when you as a company complete an action, creating open-ended time windows. This means that the reporting will continue change over time. If I run a report for May on June 5^th, I will get different numbers then if I run the report for May on June 10^th. Each time a customer clicks a link, likes the post, or sees it your metrics will continue to increase.
  • Action Based Metrics (Learn More): Report for action based metrics is based on when a customer takes an action, and has a closed time window. A report for May is the same if you run it on June 5^th or December 5^th. Whenever possible, always defer to Action Based Metric systems. The benefit is that the metrics are fixed, and much easier to understand what happened in a given time period because you don’t have to re-run the numbers over and over. Examples include Adobe and Google Analytics.
• Life of a Tweet: Tweets with self-service links have about a 14 month lifespan. Contrary to that, most social platforms stop recording metrics after 45 to 60 days. These are vastly different time periods. Our research has actually shown the largest volume of self-service link clicks happen after 2-3 months, once the tweet and shortend link becomes indexed by Google.
• Social Metrics: Because of the lifespan of a tweet, we see social metrics like Impressions continue to increase over a 3 month period. We actually see greater than 50% of social activity happens in the 2^nd and 3^rd month.
• Metrics Platforms: Overall, we don’t / can’t rely on a single social CRM tool for metrics. This results in a full value package being developed incorporating inputs from multiple channels. This increases the complexity of the ROI program, but ensures that you develop the best possible picture of what is happening.

Your Metrics Baseline:

Click to Enlarge

If you want to calculate a holistic ROI model for your social media engagement you need to look at all aspects of your work. Most companies looks at their social media activity through a single lens. Either it’s a PR type of activity, or it’s a Call Center type of activity. The reality is, it’s both. When looking for how your social media customer engagement is driving value you need to view it as a combination of a PR Campaign, and Call Center, and a Website. Once you start to look at aspects for all three, you truly start to gain a complete picture of the value and ROI that you’re driving.

The value of social media engagement should be viewed as a combination of a Website, a PR Campaign, and a Call center.

Module Example:

Click to Enlarge

The best way we have found to calculate the value of your social media engagement is to break down the work into individual modules that provide a value to the company. The above module is an example of the process that we went through.

Based on research completed by Twitter, not having an active social engagement process leads to a higher propensity to churn. For example: 36% of telecommunications customers stated they would transfer to a competitor if they did not receive a response from a service representative on social media.

Using this starting point, we created a valuation for a retained customer related to the volume of cases handled. If we, as a company, were not active on social media the cost associated with churn can be demonstrated by the model.

Module Roll-Up:

Click to Enlarge

The above slide demonstrates additional modules that can be leveraged to determine the value associated with your customer care. The modules that are applicable for your company will vary based on your industry and corporate goals. The benefit of this model is that you can combine the applicable modules for the best possible value and ROI. 

Click to Enlarge

Thank you for taking the time to review my slides. If you have any questions please let me know in the comments section.

Advertisement

Automating Web Analytics in Sprinklr

One of the best ways to track the impact from your social media support team is to integrate web analytics into your outbound links. This allows you to combine your social media cases to traffic and actions that happen on your website. It will also provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey throughout the care experience.

Sprinklr, as a platform, has the ability to automate the addition of Web Analytics to every link that is shared by your support agents. (If you use a built in shortener like Bit.ly.) This allows you to automatically tag every outbound link shared by your agents, without the agents having to make any choices. This can be done for any web analytics platform including Adobe, Google, Woopra and many more.

The following instructions cover how to integrate Google Analytics as your automated web analytics platform. These same steps can be followed for Adobe, Woopra or any web analytics platform with slight nuanced changes.

If you’re just getting started with Google Analytics UTM Codes then please visit the Google Campaign Builder. If you’re already comfortable with Google Analytics link tracking, go ahead and skip down to the next step.

Creating a Web Analytics Profile in Sprinklr

Step 1: To get started with setting up your automate UTM link tracking, navigate to the Global Menu in Sprinklr Space by clicking on the 9-dot menu button. Once on the main menu select the “Settings” option from the Social Core section.

Step 2: In the settings menu, select the “Web Analytics” option.

Step 3: Click on “Add Analytics Profile” in the top right corner.

Step 4: Once you are in the build module, you’re ready to set up your web analytics. The system will allow you to integrate both flexible fields and fixed fields. Flexible fields pull in metrics from Sprinklr’s publishing module like time stamps, business units, social media accounts and much more. These allow you to create unique link tagging based on who / what / when / and why links are being posted. Static fields will be something like the word “socialcare” that would indicated in Google that all links are related to Social Customer Care.

In the build module Enter:

• Name [Use something that will be easy to remember and understand later]
• Module Type = Publishing
• Analytics Profile Type = Google Analytics
  • This will automatically populate the possible fields available from Google Analytics.
• Parameter: You can now enter in either “flexible” fields for each option, or static options.
  • Use as many or as few options as you want.
    
  • Each UTM category can have one or more options selected.
  • For Campaign Source: I used four variable metric options,
    and used a “-“ to separate out each value from the next. Each time Sprinklr shortens a link, the system will look at the time-stamp, social network type, account name and business unit associated with the outbound message and add these in the code.
  • For Campaign Medium: I typed in “social-media”. This means that every link sent out will contain social-media as the medium code.

Once you are done, click on the save button to save your new profile.

Applying your Web Analytics for your team.

Web Analytics can be applied at multiple levels within Sprinklr. You can apply them for the entire Client globally, for an individual handle, or for a Campaign. My recommendation is to apply the Web Analytics at a Campaign level.

Note: Web Analytics are based on your domain, so if you operate more than one domain, you will need to repeat the following actions for each domain.

Step 1: Navigate back to the Home Menu and select “Campaigns” under the Planning Section.

Step 2: If you already have a Campaign set up for your Care Group click on the three dots next to the Campaign you want.

• If you don’t have a Campaign set up for your support team(s) now is the time to set one up. Using Campaigns allows you to group all social media metrics for your team’s outbound posts including Likes, Shares, Comments… The Campaign can be set as a default value for your agents. This way the won’t have to pick the Campaign each time they publish.

Step 3: Select the Web Analytics option from the drop down menu.

Step 4: Click on “Add another parameter”

Step 5: Add a Web Analytics profile for each domain you have.

Example: You will need to enter a line for socialservicevalue.com and one for socialservicevalue.net if you own both domains. You can either use a unique Campaign tracking for each domain, or use the same one for all. This will be dictated by how you want to slice & dice the metrics.

• Note: This can sometimes be tricky, and will require a little bit of testing. You can use a * at the beginning and end of the domain to get the coder to be more general. Example: *socialservicevalue.com* will pick up reports.socialservicevalue.com as well as the base domain.

Congratulations, you now have automated Web Analytics set up for your outbound links shared with customers.

Best Practices and Warnings:

• Warning: If you change your UTM codes after a few months of reporting it will confuse your data on the back-end. Put some time upfront into determining what you want to know. This will ensure that your historic metrics will align with what you’re doing in the future.
• Best Practice: I always recommend using the time stamp in your coding. This ensures that every link sent is unique, and you get visibility into the life of your posted links. [We currently see a 14 month lifespan on shared support links.]
• Best Practice: Make sure the variable fields you include in your UTM codes don’t have the option to be blank. Sprinklr has a lot of metrics fields that can be blank from time to time which will also confuse your link data.
• Best Practice: Setting up your Web Analytics at a Campaign level will allow you to separate out link tracking by Call Center or Business Unit. This will allow you to further refine your link and website data to determine which teams are driving what types on interactions on your website.
• Note: For this to work, the link must be shortened by Sprinklr. This can be done using any shortening platform you have integrated into Sprinklr. This can also be set as a default for the Social Media Agents so that they don’t have to select the shortener each time they publish.

Why You Can’t Trust Sprinklr Link Clicks

Within reporting for the Sprinklr Publishing and Engagement modules you will find 8 general link tracking “Metrics”. This doesn’t even include the platform-specific link clicks like “Twitter URL Clicks”. These metrics will allow you to track the user clicks on links that your team shares on social media.  All of these metrics vary in slightly different ways, except the one way that matters the most.

Sprinklr calculates clicks based on link hashes, with no regard for the individual post. When a link is posted, it is tagged with a unique identifier, and this is permanent within the platform. So when the same link is used in multiple posts, there is no way for Sprinklr to know which post it is based off. Because of this, clicks are attributed to the first post, and compound over time.

Note: This is true even when you are auto-tagging links with web analytics, which would theoretically create a unique url each time.

While this might lead to some issues for teams publishing marketing and PR content, it is a major issue for Care groups. This is because care teams tend to share the same links repeatedly. If you think about the 80/20 rule, the majority of your incoming support tickets are going to relate to a few recurring items. These will be thinks like: Reset my password, what deals do you currently have, my billing is wrong, and so on.

Let me demonstrate this with one of the most basic link types that our teams share. When working with customers on Account related issues, we move them from the Twitter public space to the Twitter DM space. THis is done via a direct link to the associated handle’s DM. 

In one month we shared our direct link to Twitter DM 4,867 times. When you look at the example report below you see this same link listed over and over again with over 25k clicks. While anyone would all be ecstatic to have this many clicks on a sales link shared organically in Twitter, we know that this is an absurd value for a Care link. This overstates the click values by millions because we share this link hundreds of time a day, and it is constantly adding up the number of clicks that this link receives.

Side Note: For reasons we still don’t understand, our monthly report has spit out 603 unique click counts, which I’ve been pushing back on Sprinklr about. Based on their explanation I should have 4,867 duplications of the same number since the link hash remains constant.

Synopsis:

Problem: If you are sharing links with your customers through Sprinklr, and then using Sprinklr to track the click rates, your numbers are most likely exaggerated. The more often you are sharing a specific url, the more painful the impact becomes.

Partial Resolution: Your best bet is to always apply web analytics tagging to every link that you share. You can then rely on your web analytics for an accurate count of traffic coming in to your channel. To learn more about how to do this view my blog post here. Note, this will only work for links to domains you own. At the end of the day, links like the direct to DM link in the example can’t be tracked by your web analytics.

If you have any questions on this topic feel free to drop them in the comments section!

Social Media Support ROI: Tracking Link Clicks

Once you understand the difference between Post Based Metrics and Action Based Metrics you are ready to start tracking your different social analytics. One of the first metrics you want to start tracking for both customer engagement, and publication, will be link clicks. And like everything else related to Social Media, there are multiple ways to handle this.

Tracking traffic through your publishing software

When publishing posts for your company, you should always leverage a publishing software. This allows you to schedule your posts in advance, provide multiple employees access to your handle, and multiple other benefits. The platform also will track the click-through traffic associated with posts made.

The benefit associated with this type of link tracking comes from being directly tied to your publishing activity. At the end of the month you’ll receive a list of posts made, total link clicks, clicks per post, and all other related social metrics.

The Short-Fall associated with this type of tracking comes from the fact that the reporting time constraint is post based. Any time period that you run a report on, will only provide metrics for the items published during that period. The report will exclude metrics for actions taken by the customer during that period on posts that were published prior to that date range. This sounds like a fairly small adjustment, but it can have significant impacts on your metrics.

Tracking traffic through your link shortener

A link shortener is another tool that should always be employed when publishing to social media channels. It allows you to provide a clean, and user friendly link to customers instead of the often ungainly link associated with corporate websites. It also provides the opportunity to brand your url’s, which builds trust with your users and expands visibility of your company’s footprint. Link shorteners are also time constrained by actions instead of publish date. This will help to provide a better picture of what your customers have done, and how they have interacted with your links, during the reporting time frame.

The downfall of tracking your links through your link shortener is that you have now dissociated your click traffic from your publishing activity. You will be able to report on all active links, and their total traffic within a given month, but you won’t know what post that traffic and link is associated with. Additionally, once a customer lands on your website, you no longer have visibility into what actions the customer took after clicking on the original link.

Lastly, if your link is copied and shared by your customers they are likely to replace your link shortener with their own. This will eliminate your ability to track incoming traffic associated with the original post. This especially impactful if a news source, or major blog, picks up your post and shares it on their site. This could lead to thousands of clicks that are no longer associated with your social campaign.

Tracking traffic through your Web Analytics

(Campaign Tracking)

Using Campaign Tracking to tag your shared links enables the ability to directly link your outbound posts to activities taken on your website. At the most basic: Campaign Tracking is accomplished by adding parameters at the end of your url. For example: www.yourwebsite.com?utm_source=twittercare&utm_campaign=11282017. This tells your web analytics to group all traffic associated with the utm_source “twittercare” together.

The advantages associated with enabling campaign tracking can be broken down into five categories:

• Campaign tracking is an Action Based Time Constrain metric. When you pull reporting for the month of January, you will see all actions taken on your links, and your website, within that month.
• Each link generated with a Campaign Tracking code serves as a unique url. This means that if a website, news source or blog shares your link you know that the only way they got the link was from your social post.
• Unlike short urls, which are often replaced when a link is reposted, 99% of users will never strip off your campaign tracking. This keeps intact your ability to track traffic associated with the original post.
• Well-designed Campaign Tracking can enable visibility into the entire customer journey, from social post all the way through to authenticated login or purchase.
• Campaign Tracking is part of your web analytics platform. So anything you track for your website, like sales or authentication, can also be tracked using a Campaign.

Setting up Campaign tracking is different for each Web Analytics platform out there, but they all work basically the same. The similarity across platforms allows for the standardization of best practices, and implementation.

When using a social publishing platform like Sprinklr, you can automate every link sent out to have Campaign Tracking added. This greatly simplifies the process of adding the codes, and ensures that every agent publishing links is correctly adding the codes. If you are using a platform that does not automate the addition on Campaign Codes, like SalesForce, then you will need to create a simple and quick process for adding the codes to your outbound links. (We built a widget that added the Campaign code and shortened the link).

Some best practices to get you started:

• Every code should start with one repeating piece. Such as utm_source=socialcare. This will ensure that when you are pulling reports everything is grouped together, and you aren’t trying to track down all of the codes that have been used.
• Always add a timestamp. This ensures that every link is unique, and will give you an idea of the lifespan of your shared links.
• Determine what is most important to your organization: Is it knowing which Call Center shard the link, what social channel it was shared on, or what contact type it was. The potential list can be endless so prioritize and build this into your design.
• Remember that these codes are publically visible. Don’t include agent names or anything else that might negatively impact your employees or company.

 

Understanding the Value you’ve driven.

After you have begun adding Campaign Tracking to your links, you can begin to calculate the value that your shared links drive. Your customer support managers are sharing links to digital self-service and support sites, so utilization of the shared links is viewed as contact deflection. When supporting customers within social, additional customers are capable of leveraging the links shared for self-service. This drives incremental value beyond the one-to-one interaction.

The calculation we created leverages the concept of Contact Deflection, with additional funnel reductions to drive a conservative value.

Distributed Click-Through Value = Total monthly clicks on shared links (Unique Users) * Average additional click through rate for shared links (71%) [ 1] * Containment Rate (70%) [ 2] * Average value of a support contact ($7) [ 3]

1. This reduction allows you to remove the traditional one-to-one relationship, and calculate value on the one-to-many aspect of social: Based on an average click through rate of 3.5. A click through rate of 1 would show a one-to-one relationship. This provides us a 2.5 click rate of additional value or, 71.4% distributed additional value from the shared links.
2. The Containment Rate is a measurement of the percentage of self-service users that do not need to contact your support centers after using their support channels. This can be found either through surveys, or software solutions.
3. The average value of a support contact comes from your support centers. This is the value that your company did not incur for contacts.

 

Synopsis

Tracking traffic through your Publishing Software:

• Positive: Your click through numbers are directly related to the posts being made.
• Negative: Reports will only include clicks on links shared within the time period, ignoring all other active content.

Tracking traffic through your URL Shortener:

• Positive: Reports will include all click activity that happens within the chosen timeframe.
• Negative: Shortened links are disassociated with the outbound message, limiting your awareness of what message went with the link.
• Negative: It is hard to understand the “Created” date of a short url.

Tracking traffic through your Campaign Codes:

• Positive: Reports will include all click activity that happens within the chosen timeframe.
• Positive: You can design your Campaign Codes to track back to the original post.
• Positive: Your Campaign Code is a part of your web analytics. This is the only tool that allows you to see the full customer journey from Social through to Purchase or self-service.
• Negative: Not all publishing platforms can automatically generate Campaign Tagging. This is a barrier to implementation.

 

Post Based Metrics | Action Based Metrics

Social Media Support ROI: Action Based Metrics

Before you attempt to build your Social Media Support Value Model, we need to talk about the two classifications of social metrics. This is a fundamental concept to understand, because it dictates when and how you need to pull your reporting. Your analytics can be broken down into two unique classifications based on how the results are captured. These two classifications are Post-Based Metrics and Action-Based Metrics. In general, your reporting tool drives whether your metrics are action or post based, and you need to ask your software provide with methodology they are using.

This classification refers to metrics based on actions taken by the user within a pre-defined window. The most significant differentiation from Post based metrics is that your results are not impacted by when actions were taken by the company. When pulling results for the month of January, you would see actions taken on your posts based on what customers did within that month. This means that if a post from December continued to trend into January, you would see metrics related to that post.

The benefit of Action Based metrics, from an operational perspective, is that the metric generation is confined. Once your time period has closed, your analytics are locked in place.

Synopsis: Metric reporting based on when an action is taken by a customer. These metrics lock-in at the end of the month, and once the reporting window has closed, will not change.

Platform Example: Adobe Analytics

 

Post Based Metrics | Tracking Link Clicks