Delivering best customer experience is a critical objective of every customer-centric business. Customer support and service departments play a phenomenal role in delivering such great customer experience after the initial transaction. However, seldom these departments are used to identify brand advocates that can root for the brand after they received great customer service and support.

In this article, we describe how you can go about using your customer service and support departments to collaborate with your marketing department to identify and nurture your brand advocates.  We use Zendesk as a representative customer support system and its integration with ReadyPulse to illustrate the concept.

Connect your Zendesk implementation to listen to Facebook and Twitter conversations for customer support purposes. Zendesk provides native connectors to social media networks.

As your customer support team is using Zendesk to listen to Facebook/Twitter conversations and providing help to your customers. they can tag each conversation as positive or negative and also tag the conversation for its nature (such as feedback, complaint, applause) and request type (e.g., promotion, shipping, returns).  Tagging scheme will depend on your business and there is a need for appropriate training of your customer support staff to ensure consistent tagging. Tagging will remove noise from your Facebook conversations and bubble up important conversations that are worth tracking.

ReadyPulse provides a connector to Zendesk to enable you to bring social conversations along with their associated metadata (sentiment, conversation nature and request type or any other tags).  Once your conversations are in ReadyPulse, you can leverage the power of ReadyPulse to identify brand advocates as well as use the social content provided by those brand advocates.

To add your Zendesk account to ReadyPulse, go to the “Manage Brand” tab and locate the “Third Party Integrations” tab. Provide the Zendesk URL, user name and password. Once you hit on Save, ReadyPulse will start connecting to Zendesk and retrieve the Facebook content along with any tags you have created on ongoing basis. Once your Facebook content is retrieved from Zendesk, the content is available in the ReadyPulse User Content Tab for further use within ReadyPulse widgets. We will discuss these aspects in the later paragraphs.

Once the Zendesk setup is complete, you can browse content from Zendesk in the ReadyPulse User Content Tab. Each post/tweet is shown with tags created using Zendesk interface and those tags are available as keywords to search for later use in ReadyPulse widgets.

Using the Audience section of ReadyPulse, search for the audience that are marked positive and you want to accord the status of brand advocates. Once identified, you can add them to your brand advocates list maintained within ReadyPulse.  You may consider maintaining multiple lists as necessary. There could be lists based on customer tier, such as Platinum, Gold and Silver.  ReadyPulse already provides segmentation of audience based on the gender and engagement. In addition, keywords can be used to identify audience based on their location.

1. Continue to deliver best possible customer experience – think of your VIP customers
2. Listen to your best customers and fans at the executive level. Within ReadyPulse, check the Daily Pulse flag for your brand advocates list to receive a daily digest of posts and tweets made by your advocates.
3. Display content shared by your brand advocates.  We will discuss this aspect more in detail in the paragraph below.

With added quality check on your brand advocates you are assured of the content they produce, which means you have a great marketing asset available to promote your business. As a next step in leveraging social content from your advocates, you can create a ReadyPulse widget to display the best content from your social marketing assets.

Using Social User Generated Content (UGC) on your web sites is not a new idea anymore with Twitter and Facebook widgets being used in many web sites. However, what’s new is identifying quality and relevant social content and repurpose the social content to drive more online conversions.  Read our related blog on the topic – “Beating Amazon in Review Game – Top 3 Ways to Boost Sales using Social Testimonials.”

Learn more on using social content to drive online conversions by downloading our white paper “Passion Doesn’t Fit into 5 Stars”.