Community Management at Ferguson is an extremely in-depth program. We use this program to interact with our many audience groups and create a network in which they can connect, share, and grow. We also use this program to gain insights into how we are perceived as a company, how the various parts of our business are performing, track sentiment, and much more. Since we have multiple social media channels within our social media presence at Ferguson, it is important to differentiate responses for each. Because of this, we have 10 response guides all fit to suit Ferguson’s brand voice, while each being 5+ pages in length. These response guides are updated weekly, if not daily, and are living, breathing documents that our community managers use constantly.
Our strategy for community management at Ferguson is simple, yet complex. We ensure that our community managers are always on, always authentic, always listening, always using the Ferguson brand voice, always sharing appreciation to our followers on social media, and always appropriately recording/noting their interactions with our followers to help better improve our program. We want our followers to feel excited when we respond to them, even when the reason they’re reaching out to us might not be positive. We respond to all breadths of comments and messages, but it is important to note we have specific strategies for each type.
When it comes to positive engagement, it is important to make sure a follower feels seen and that his/her voice is being heard. People on social media like to be recognized and talked about, so this is the perfect way to do so. It also adds the necessary “human interaction” layer that a lot of our followers are looking for.
Engaging with negative comments is equally important as engaging with positive comments, since how you handle a negative comment largely determines a brand’s credibility. There are situations when comments are ignored, hidden, or a user is blocked, but this only occurs when a comment is highly inappropriate or offensive and it does not adhere to the community rules and regulations.
While it would be easy to use pre-determined responses and let our social media management tool automate some of the work, it's important to our team that we are personalizing every response, which includes reviewing previous interactions if there are any, determining which part of the business the message is related to so that we're providing anything that is specific to that business group, etc.
As aforementioned, since we have multiple social media channels within our social media presence at Ferguson, we have 10 response guides that all differ in tone, voice, and keywords depending on what part of the business it is meant for. These response guides are updated often so that we can put our best foot forward when responding to messages on social media.
Along with all of these impressive notes regarding our response strategy for community management at Ferguson, it is also important to mention that we have an extensive categorization process within our social media management tool, Sprinklr. After our community managers respond to a comment or message within Sprinklr, they categorize their engagements into one of many sections, which in turn helps us create reporting around community management and brand sentiment, as well as set benchmarks to overcome and excel past.
Our strategy will continue to evolve as time moves forward. But our dedication to a positive customer experience while performing community management will always be our top priority.
Since expanding our community management program and really focusing in on our strategy, we have seen great success in all aspects of performance and execution.
For example, we grew from two business groups to 10 in the span of a year and have created in-depth community management strategies for all of them in equal time. When we were first starting out, our response times were not up to par with industry standards. Now, our community managers are always on and respond within minutes! Within the last 6 months, our team of community managers have had a 95% success rate of responding within industry standards. Along with this, we set expectations with our followers when we are offline, so they know when to expect a response in the morning.
We have also sent out multiple iterations of a customer satisfaction survey after successfully helping someone on social media via community management. Data shows that the overall sentiment is over 93% positive across all social channels!
We are able to find and understand these metrics thanks to our social media management tool, Sprinklr, which helps us analyze the categorization data our community managers input after every interaction they have on social media.
