The Cisco SocialBridge was created in 2017 to bring the brand’s social care presence to new heights and deliver incredible social experiences and an unprecedented level of support to customers and users.
The SocialBridge strives to never miss an opportunity to engage with users across social media, forums, and the web – and works to build and strengthen relationships, answer questions, capture feedback, and offer assistance and support when users are frustrated or need a connection to our company or leaders. Through a unique company-wide network of product and technical experts, we are able to answer questions more completely than ever before at Cisco – bringing an enhanced social support experience to everyone we encounter online.
In 2019, driven by our mission to deliver faster and better answers to more customers than ever before, we focused on the following goals of streamlining workflows to automate and eliminate unnecessary and time-consuming tasks, utilizing artificial intelligence to identify and prioritize addressable conversations, optimizing and reorganizing keyword lists across the business, scaling our robust expert network across all product lines and architectures, and developing data and analytics reports to help us analyze program performance and identify optimization opportunities.
It has been an exciting year, full of blue-sky thinking, testing and learning, and company-wide teamwork! Read on to learn more about our strategy and outcomes, and if you ever need to reach us, drop us a line @HeyCisco on Twitter - we are here to help!
This year, we implemented the following strategies and improvements to deliver expert answers to more customers than ever before.
- Implementation of New Social Care Tool: Working closely with Sprinklr, we implemented a care tool and designed workflows to maximize efficiency and streamline interactions between internal teams. The tool allows for threading of multiple-message conversations to enable smooth handoffs among agents, custom dashboards, metric tracking, and more, allowing us to spend more time focused on helping customers.
- Development of Enhanced Reporting Features: We can analyze our data in more robust ways – like monitoring how long each step of a response takes or identifying process delays and outliers. The insights have been pivotal in the development and refinement of our strategic roadmap and have helped us to understand our performance, identify blockers, and recognize key areas of opportunity in creating improved user experiences.
- Recruitment of Company-Wide Subject Matter Experts: We recruited Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from across the company to increase our expert resources by 10x over last year. This robust company-wide network of 150 SMEs has helped us to answer questions more quickly and deliver expert answers across a broader range of subjects.
- Development and Deployment of Three Artificial Intelligence Models: In partnership with our CX and Digital Marketing data science teams, we built and deployed three AI models that have improved our efficiency, helped to identify and prioritize engagement opportunities, streamlined our processes, and more including:
- Post Category Model: Analyzes unstructured text and classifies post type, allowing us to focus on specific subsets of opportunities as needed and prioritize incoming opportunities.
- Cisco-Related Model: Categorizes if a post is related to Cisco or not and improves our efficiency in finding engageable conversations.
- Sentiment Categorization Model: Recognizes if a post’s sentiment is positive, neutral, or negative and allows agents to prioritize posts and measure our impact on the user’s experience.
- Creation of a Company-Wide Social Crisis Communication Strategy: In partnership with a network of legal, HR, communications, security, and more we developed and implemented crisis identification alerts and workflows. These items have helped us to quickly identify crisis situations, strategize with core teams, implement company-wide responses, and have reduced team confusion about response instructions.
- Creation of a Direct Partnership with Virtual Sales Teams: This year, we identified over 230 leads on social and developed a partnership to send leads directly to our sales team to address. This reduced the amount of time our users waited before getting the help they needed.
- Development and Evolution of Custom Message Tagging: We refined our custom tagging strategy to quantify and analyze customer conversations and identify key insights teams like customer-requested product improvement opportunities and main feedback themes.
- Optimization of Keywords & Dashboards: We optimized and improved our listening keywords and keyword organization which allows us to analyze social data more efficiently and deeply and identify more engagement opportunities.
- Content Testing: We are currently testing new ways to help customers and increase our efficiency by using gifs and videos.
Since launching in 2017, the SocialBridge has seen continued success in helping customers connect with Cisco experts on social media. Our efforts have led to many exciting results including:
- Over 4,600 direct customer interactions and issues resolved
- 31% of our interactions and conversations are proactive and listening-based
- A 37% sentiment change from negative or neutral at the start of conversations to increased positive outcomes at the end of the conversation, which speaks to how our approach positively impacts customers
- A 107.8% increase in total user interactions across @Cisco, our major Cisco handle over the previous year
- A 4.6 ppt increase in net positive sentiment across the handles we manage
- Identification of 230+ sales leads on social media which are sent directly to our sales team to address – reducing the amount of time our users had to wait to get the help they needed
- Our AI models eliminated the 99.9% of conversations that were not relevant or actionable, to help us to focus on the 0.1% of relevant conversations so we could address the highest-priority concerns first
Using social listening, we identified customers' trending feedback and concerns around our use of excessive product packaging. This social feedback and feedback collected by other teams was delivered to leadership which drove major changes in Cisco’s packaging operations in the next fiscal year. We then used customer tweets to create a catchy video to let our audience know that we listened and their feedback helped Cisco to go green.
Video for Cisco SocialBridge: Connecting Customers with Expert Answers
