SUCCESS STORIES
How The Hyde Group Deliver Exceptional Customer Service On Social Media
The Hyde Group is an award-winning provider of homes. As one of the largest housing associations in the UK, they manage or own circa 50,000 homes and support over 100,000 residents. Hyde Housing Association is a not-for-profit organisation within the group of companies which also includes charities and for-profit subsidiaries.
The Background
The Hyde Group actively encourages residents to get online, using its website, Facebook and Twitter to keep customers and residents up to date about the latest news and important information. At the same time, the Communications team also recognised that the number of inbound questions and enquiries they received via social media was increasing.
“We realised that social media is the channel of choice for an increasing number of customers and residents, so we wanted to make sure we were able to grow it and manage it properly to provide good customer service, and manage the risks.”
“We were running several social media accounts, manually logging in and out which was inefficient and time-consuming. The more people we shared login details with, the more risk there was. We couldn’t tell who had posted out specific messages, so it was hard to ensure a consistent level of quality. In order to grow we had to be able to manage all our activity properly.”
The Challenges
- Use social media to communicate effectively with multiple audiences, including social housing residents, new homebuyers and existing homebuyers.
- Capture customer complaints and enquiries received via social media and allow the Customer Service team to respond in a timely and appropriate manner.
- Enable 30 users from different teams to safely access the corporate social media accounts to view, post and respond on social media.
- Gain full visibility of all social media accounts, and record an audit trail of all activity that takes place on each account and by each user.
- Mitigate the risks associated with operating multiple social media accounts and a multi-functional group of social media users.
In a nutshell
“We looked at several solutions and ultimately selected SoCrowd as the best solution to take us to the next level in terms of social media, and we have been using the platform since 2015.
We needed a solution that was easy to adopt, would enable us to grow our use of social media for outbound communications, but at the same time provide us with a secure platform to track, audit and monitor all inbound communications too.”
Using SoCrowd’s central dashboard view, the Communications team had complete visibility of all social media activity for the first time. Members of the Communications, Customer Service and several other teams were set up to use the platform with different permissions based on their roles and experience in social media.
“It’s an easy-to-use social media platform which enables you to manage all inbound and outbound activity via one secure portal. Each user has their own login which provides an audit trail for all activity, minimising the risk to the business.
It helps set consistent, high quality standards for content and imagery and maintain these via validation. It also has excellent analytics which improves the quality and timeliness of reporting, and the conversations tool is helpful for Customer Service staff who need to work as a team to manage inbound customer contact.”
How we got here
Since 2015, The Hyde Group has successfully grown and developed its social media presence, improving the quality, consistency and timeliness of responses across all channels, and increasing its total number of followers by 175%.
The Communications team also introduced two new social media accounts providing specific content to different audiences, and increased the number of trained social media users in a controlled and managed way.
“SoCrowd enables us to group users by team or department, control their access to accounts, and assign relevant permissions depending on their role. We have 20 users across the business within Communications, Customer Services, Property Services, HR and other teams. Plus, we have 10 trained users at our out-of-hours supplier monitoring our social media accounts outside of our business hours.”
The Communications team creates tailored social media plans in partnership with each department to improve customer engagement, raise the profile of the business, and help channel shift from more traditional communications channels.
“This is the first time we have used an enterprise social media management platform and we’ve never looked back. We are much more productive as each user has their own login to access all the social media networks they’ve been given access to, and we can schedule a large amount of content in advance to help manage the team’s workload and avoid duplication.
The Customer Service team would not want to go back to the old way of working. Using the Conversations tool we deal with all inbound customer enquiries efficiently in one place. We can assign messages to different members of the team, see which enquiries are open and closed, and add notes for colleagues.”
The SoCrowd platform allows Hyde to monitor their response times to all customer enquiries and use that data to ensure the right resources are in place to deliver a high level of service.
“The excellent Analytics tools enable us to track and report on our inbound and outbound activity and the effectiveness of individual campaigns quickly and accurately.”
The Hyde Group increased its use of social media whilst managing the potential risks to the business using the security and control capabilities of SoCrowd.
“The Validation function provides a ‘second pair of eyes’ for certain content being published, allowing us to maintain the overall quality and consistency of our content, and also gives new users the confidence to start creating and responding to content.”
Result!
The SoCrowd platform has enabled the Hyde Group to deliver a successful social media strategy, growing and developing its social media presence while minimising the risk to the business.
- Improved productivity by eliminating manual log in and out for multiple social media accounts.
- Allowed the Customer Service team to deal with inbound communications more efficiently with complete visibility of all messages and responses across all social media accounts.
- Established an audit trail of all social media activity allowing the Communications team monitor and provide feedback to individual users.
- Implemented a ‘second pair of eyes’ process to validate certain content before it is published live to improve and maintain the overall quality and consistency of content.
- Able to track and report on the all inbound and outbound communications quickly and accurately, and monitor the performance of social media content and the team.
- Increased the total number of followers across all accounts by 175%.
- Facilitated channel shift enabling residents to find information quickly and intuitively online.
