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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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. 

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

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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!