At Cisco, social media has often been seen as a publishing channel to amplify brand messaging. In fear of the unknown, we refrained from responding or interacting with users. After a significant investment in social listening, and help from our partners at Sprinklr, we knew it was time for a change.
The SocialBridge was formed in September of 2017, to act as a bridge that connects our customers, users and partners to our vast network of employee experts. Our cross-functional team across customer experience, sales, support, engineering, marketing, and more focused on delivering best-in-class social care. Using social listening and analytics , we partner to engage customers and inform business decisions.
Since our inception, we have focused on the following objectives:
To fundamentally change Cisco's approach to social customer care, the SocialBridge Team developed a cross-functional, data-led, and customer-focused strategy.
Utilizing best-in-class Sprinklr listening tools, the SocialBridge team is able to listen and respond across 7 channels including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Cisco Communities, and forums, meeting Cisco's users natively in-platform wherever they are. Supporting customers across 10 different languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, and more.
Cornerstone to our ability to provide high-quality expert answers is our cross-organizational collaboration with diverse teams of subject matter experts around the world including customer experience, product teams, technical support, sales, customer research, and more. Through these partnerships, we are able to leverage the limitless expertise of our talented staff to provide precise and high-quality answers that distinguish our social care from typical canned customer service responses.
Key Program Features Include:
-Surge Alerts – Using rules within Sprinklr we can quickly identify, route, and manage potential issues that require more sensitive and immediate responses or escalation.
-Process Mapping – Workflows and process mapping have allowed us to steadily decrease our response times to an average of 30 minutes. With the implementation of our social care tool we'll enable even faster response times.
-Custom Tagging and Reporting – We can quantify and analyze every customer conversation and interaction across products, inquiry, sentiment, keywords, and topic of interest allowing us to provide key insights back into the business.
- Keyword and Dashboard Optimization - We have focused on continuous optimization of our listening keywords and dashboards to help care agents surface support and relationship-building opportunities.
-Intent Modeling & NPS – Through our unique listening capabilities we have been able to marry our intent modeling with social listening to enhance our SEO performance and provide deeper insights into our Net Promoter Scores.
-Command Center – Our core command center is located in our San Jose headquarters with plans to scale across all regions beginning in Q3.
Our unique ability to utilize our vast network of employee experts and partners, customer research, data, and insights is what truly gives the SocialBridge team the ability to provide outstanding customer experiences. Our efforts allow us to create compelling customer experiences, engage in real-time interactions, and inform our content planning decisions.
Since launching in September 2017, the SocialBridge network of experts has steadily grown and our collaboration has seen continued success.
-Listening across 45 Million Cisco-related conversations, an average of 8 Million per month
-500+ customer issues resolved
-27% of our interactions and conversations are proactive and listening-based
-We have driven a 15% sentiment change from negative/neutral to positive across all of our conversations, which speaks to our service-oriented mindset
-We have driven a 49% increase in user interactions across @Cisco, our major Cisco handle
-Our efforts have resulted in a 5.3 ppt increase in net positive sentiment overall
-Identified 70+ direct sales leads
-50x increase in messages exchanged with customers directly
In the end, our proudest achievement is the relationships we've built with customers as we celebrate their wins and provide them with support. In one exchange, a customer named Mike tagged us saying that he was struggling to study for his CCNA exam while balancing his family life. We offered friendly encouragement and Mike thanked us for helping him to feel "more motivated than ever!" It's exchanges like this that mean the world to us and keep us moving forward to keep pushing the program to new heights of innovation and customer care.
