Leeds City Council – customer service focused social media

Objectives – what did you want to achieve?

We want to build Leeds City Council’s reputation on social media so that:

• we are a trusted voice that can quickly reach a large proportion of people;
• we are a proactive provider of information before significant volumes of offline contact is generated
• we actively build our reputation rather than simply reacting to contact generated by events or issues.

We’re building a foundation of customers who feel confident transacting with us online so that we have a larger cohort of users ready to self-serve as we move more transactions online. Simultaneously, we are carefully designing our outbound social media campaigns around peaks and troughs in calls to our contact centre. Our social media team is actually based within the contact centre itself for this reason.

Audiences – who did you target and why?

The audience demographic shifts depending on the time of year. We know that our call centre has an increase in calls around deadlines such as putting in an application for your child’s primary school, so we’re likely to get calls from eager parents. This year, for the first time, all applications are to be made online, so we’ve produced a video guide and will be offering support over social media. The video has so far had around a thousand views, which doesn’t sound like a huge amount but if that’s a thousand less phone calls then we’re talking big impact – and the deadline is still over a month away.

Strategy – how did you make this happen?

We look at our contact centre peaks and outline key dates throughout the year. Around these, we can design our plan of what to post and when. We ask our CSOs what sort of questions people keep asking and pre-empt the phone call. Every call to our contact centre costs time and money. If we post the answers on social media, calls are saved. If we encourage a discussion, customers talk to each other and answer their own questions. It’s all about trying to establish what our customers, in our opinion, need to see (such as important changes to services) and mix it up with what our customers want to see (engaging, interesting content such as local stories and local history).

Tactics – what channels, tools, platforms and content did you use?

We use Facebook and Twitter/TweetDeck, though we have different approaches to both. It’s important to remember the difference between how each platform displays content to our audience. Twitter is chronological – you can post about the same subject a couple of times a day without boring people. A good post on Facebook will pop up at the top of someone’s news feed the day after it was posted if it’s still getting attention. Facebook posts need to be carefully constructed to be eyecatching and encourage those clicks and likes, while at the same time avoiding clickbait. It’s a bit of an art.

Did it work? What were the outcomes?

Each campaign has told its own story. We closely monitor how much reach each post is getting both as it’s gone out and then retrospectively at the end of each campaign chapter. We look at what worked and what didn’t work, and all the factors that might have surrounded this mystical formula. Over the last year our followers on Facebook have doubled. We now receive hundreds of enquiries every week and have a dedicated team there to answer them right away. From a customer experience perspective, if they’ve contacted us via that channel, the last thing they want is to be told to pick up the phone instead. It’s the way forward.

What did you learn?

Timing is everything. Nobody wants to set up a Direct Debit for their Council Tax two weeks before they’ve received their bill, so don’t waste your time trying to encourage people to do things until what you’re talking about is relevant to their everyday lives.

Audiences can be switched off very easily – the trick is to analyse what’s happened when you notice they’re switched on, and try and replicate it in the future. A great post can reach over 200 per cent of our followers, a decent post will reach about 40 per cent, an average post round 8 per cent and any less than that is a flop. As our campaigns developed, we noticed the majority of our posts being ‘decent’, and fewer campaigns where there would be a sea of flops with the occasional spot of greatness. As they say, quality over quantity.

Would you do anything differently?

We’re pretty much forced to constantly change our approaches. Twitter and Facebook aren’t the free advertising god-send they used to be –they’ve sucked us into their platform and now they seem to want money for the convenience. My managers, rightly so, are questioning why I would consider paying Facebook money when we’ve managed it for free for so many years. By looking at what resonates with our audience we can get the most out of our investments, and ultimately save those phone calls.

Want to know more?

Contact Nicholas Moore via email or by calling 07712217071