Social Media Monitoring & Response with Flexible Seasonal Staffing

How iQor Protects and Enhances the Brand Image of a Leading Online Retailer

Background

This retailer is one of the leading online retailers in the United States and abroad with a recognized need for ramped-up seasonal staffing.

The company is known for delivering all sorts of high-quality gift offerings including chocolates, baked goods, gift baskets, and designer popcorn for major holidays and special occasions such as birthdays, Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day.

Customers can order gifts through one of its many franchised and company-owned brick and mortar retail stores as well as many domestic and overseas affiliates, or online through its full-service eCommerce website.

The Challenge

Previously, the retailer relied mostly on voice interactions to take orders and provide an outstanding customer experience to fulfill gifting needs. With the roll-out of their eCommerce website, they continued to take orders online and soon found themselves experimenting in the social media space with Facebook to complete transactions.

Eventually, they realized that social media (SM) channels are much more than just a way to transact business, but also a digital communication medium that needed to be appropriately leveraged to deliver exceptional customer service and experience—just like they had done successfully with call centers throughout the years.

Customers expect a response to their complaints within 30 minutes to an hour.

Source: HubSpot

To engage with their digital community, the company initiated its very first customer experience program specifically targeted at social media platforms.

Looking to continue its digital customer experience solution, the organization decided to expand its work with iQor— our team that had been successfully providing customer experience support through call centers and email communications for the past six years.

The Solution

iQor took over the social media monitoring program in 2017, providing customer experience and support for the retailer’s three major social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They started with a small team and have since grown substantially to meet all critical business requirements, metrics, and standards. Since taking over, iQor has been continuously providing all social media monitoring and response functions for the retailer.

As part of the social media monitoring solution, iQor agents respond to all customer inquiries and complaints posted on the retailer’s three social media channels. These typically include, but are not limited to, billing queries, quality issues, and delayed or missing product complaints.

Social media messages for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are consolidated and assigned to iQor agents through a third-party social media and customer experience management platform.

Ramping to 750% with Ease

During the non-seasonal time of year, there are approximately 30 full-time iQor agents monitoring and managing these platforms with minimal involvement from the retailer itself. When peak business seasons occur—Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas—there is a rapid ramp-up to 250+ agents to handle the increased volume of customer engagement in social media. The seasonal staffing ramp-up can easily approach 750% for Mother’s Day—the biggest holiday for the gift and floral industry.

A Stress-Free Peak Season

The retailer can turn on as many seats as needed with a few simple clicks with iQor’s cloud-based network, ready-to-go talent pool, and intuitive training.

From 30 agents to:

To always ensure that ramp-up requirements are strictly met, iQor uses its cloud-based network, seasonal and full-time talent pool, and training at scale to fully extend across the non-peak seasonal periods (9 months out of the year). By partnering with iQor, the retailer has never fallen short of trained and capable agents ready to immediately respond to social media queries during peak seasons.

Agents are empowered and have access to all the tools required to solve any customer experience problem. iQor works independently and it is rare that it ever has to go back to the retailer for assistance in resolving a customer issue. On the rare occasions that it happens, agents reach out to the company by email. They are also authorized to directly contact delivery services and retailers to get information for customers.  

The Results

The retailer is experiencing phenomenal results. By using iQor’s social media monitoring agents, the retailer has routinely met or exceeded customer expectations and all requirements for handling social media channel responses and follow-up.

Agents Respond to Customers at Hyper-Speed

The service level agreement (SLA) requires that iQor agents meet a predetermined response time to customers within 8 minutes. This response time must be achieved 99.9% of the time. iQor agents, on average, respond within 3 to 5 minutes. Since the inception of the program, iQor has met this goal every month except for one month due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Every Customer is Answered

iQor’s social media monitoring teams have been consistently handling high levels of concurrent interaction with the retailer’s customers on social media channels. During peak seasons, agents can handle up to 6 or 7 messages and can process up to 1,000 cases per day. For non-peak seasons, concurrency rates are about 3 messages at a time as the retailer experiences roughly 200 cases per week.

The opportunity to participate in social media responses keeps iQor employees feeling engaged and more fulfilled, resulting in high retention rates.

“This is where I feel like my strength lies. Social Media carries a variety of workloads that I thoroughly enjoy working on.”

Melanie Small, iQor Agent

Quality is Always Maintained

iQor conducts random quality checks on selected pieces of information from customer interactions, reviewing 150 interactions per week across all agents for grammar, punctuation, and resolutions. As a result, customer experience quality is maintained at a high, and stable, rate of 96%.

Overall, the retailer has been extremely pleased with the results as expressed in this message by the Customer Experience Senior Manager:

“Team, another “perfect 10” day in social media performance across the board . . . . Additionally, thanks for the real-time workload assignment adjustments between social media and voice when necessary due to call queue. Please continue leveraging this flexibility that you’ve mastered.”