The words ‘channel shift’ can give the wrong impression. Rather than ‘shifting’, we are trying to offer our customers more flexibility so that they can contact us the way they’re most comfortable with, whether by social media, email or on the phone.
A few weeks ago I attended #channelshiftcamp in Derby, where there were many discussions around getting customer service ‘social’, and moving responsibility away from digital and communications teams. It was interesting to hear the lessons learnt from councils that had already implemented this, and also comforting to know that what we are proposing was not an alien concept!
One of the things local government has had to recognise is that social media is a two-way channel. People will ask questions, and leaving them unanswered is like leaving a phone to ring or leaving a helpdesk unmanned when there’s a long queue of customers waiting. We never wanted it to be an extra channel for us to push out press releases and campaign messages, but we can also admit that we do not use it to engage with our customers as much as we’d like to. This is not because we don’t want to, far from it! We just need to make sure that all our systems are linked properly, and communication links are strong enough for it to work as it should. The last thing we want to do is make our social customers ‘stand in a queue’ because we haven’t done the behind the scenes work properly!
We now use Crowd Control HQ social media management software. It is still early days, but security-wise it's great – each individual user has their own login so there is no sharing of passwords or the hassle of having to change 367 passwords at the same time if someone moves on. Plus, we have the ability to track the activity of every user (mwahahaha), so in the event of any rogue behaviour, the culprit can be identifed. So far, our team, our communications colleagues, and a handful of cherry-picked ‘digital masters’ from service areas around the council are plugged into the system to test it, but we are hoping to roll this out to customer services and most of our account holders very soon (bearing in mind we have around 85 social media accounts!)…watch this space.
Alongside this we have rewritten our social media policy, as rather than needing to sell the benefits of social media, we are now at the stage where we need staff to feel comfortable with the technology and use it well. Also, increased anxiety around 'risk', and our introduction of Crowd Control HQ, has brought about the need to 'up the ante' in terms of making security more central to our policies. Once we have had these signed off we will publish and share.
Right - whether it is a tweet or a blog post, I will share again soon..
Cait