Ever since @ComcastCares kicked off the social media customer service revolution seven years ago, companies have been evolving and refining their approach to handling customer service issues in a proliferating number of channels in ever-tighter timeframes.

Telecommunications service provider Sprint Corp. is adopting a new approach to customer service that empowers agents to move incoming concerns to resolution across Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. The company has adopted  Conversocial, Inc.’s monitoring and customer service dashboard to enable quicker and more personalized interactions. John R. Glenn (right), vice president of care strategy, operations and transformation at Sprint, told of the results the company is having with its @SprintCare Twitter account and other social support services in this Q&A interview.

SiliconANGLE: What problem were you trying to solve?

Glenn: Simply put, our mission is to meet our customers where they are, to listen for emerging trends, and to resolve their service needs without requiring they interrupt their day with needing to call customer service. We identified a large segment of our customer base that preferred to engage with us via social media for account- and/or service-related needs.  It became increasingly clear to us that we had a great opportunity to extend our service delivery capabilities. By actively engaging our customers through social channels, we’re able to create a low-effort experience. At the end of the day, we believe this experience will foster brand advocates.

SiliconANGLE: What led you to the solution you ultimately chose?

Glenn: As we’ve evolved this channel, we’ve seen the marketplace also evolve solutions for social customer service.  We’ve had three solutions for social customer engagement since the Social Care team was formed.

At first, it was important to deliver everything into a single stream for monitoring. This was more of a listening tool approach, and it worked until our growth made it difficult for agents to find relevant conversations and not duplicate each other’s work.

Next, we deployed a tool that delivered posts to our agents so they didn’t have to search for content, but the context of the conversation was lost. As you can imagine, with our large-scale social customer service team of hundreds of agents across multiple call center sites operating 24×7, customers were dissatisfied that their posts would be replied to by multiple agents and context lost by treating each message as a separate interaction. Imagine getting one text or one line of an email from someone and having to search for the rest of the conversation. We recognized this wasn’t an effective way for our team to operate.

Our current provider, Conversocial, enables us to put the focus on the customer’s conversation with Sprint. Our customer service team members now have the full context of each customer’s interaction, whether the customer is responding to someone else’s comment within a Facebook thread or tweeting us on their own. That history is important.

We’ve also been impressed with the automatic workflow assignment feature, called PLAY, and the dashboard and analytics within the tool offered vast improvements over our prior solutions. Conversocial understands the metrics important to contact centers and also social customer service.

SiliconANGLE: What surprises or unexpected issues did you encounter?

Glenn: We did have a few issues initially. For example, there was a lack of history related to private messages being pulled into the application. There was some confusion related to messages being assigned to multiple agents as well as the dashboard and team performance not loading. Users initially weren’t able to search by customer name and some of the messages and posts weren’t routing property.

The Conversocial team was onsite for our deployments and handled issues immediately. Their developers were on standby specifically for us and their customer success team was there to assist our agents with any questions or issues that arose.

SiliconANGLE: What measurable results have you seen?

Glenn: We only had the new tool in place for about a month before we saw improvements to our key performance indicators. Almost immediately, we were been able to deliver 70 percent response time in 15 minutes or less. With our previous tool we were responding to approximately 40 to 60 percent of the time in 30 minutes or less. That’s big. Speed to respond is critical, as we know it prevents repetition, and it’s what customers have come to expect.

Creative Commons photo by Mike Mozart via Flickr.