[HowTo] Customer Success Tracking for Social Media Trainers

Customer Success Tracking is a new term that’s super applicable to the world of social media training.

To understand it, let’s break it down:

• “Customer Success” means your customers being successful – reaping the promised rewards of your service.
• “Tracking” means keeping track of their social media activity and condensing it into a meaningful report
• So, “Customer Success Tracking” is keeping track of what your customers consider success and then reporting it back to them.

Why is Customer Success Tracking (CST) important for social media trainers?

As trainers, we sell the benefits of being effective on social media. This is our pitch to our customers. This is what they are buying.

For customers to be successful that means our job is not simply to impart social media wisdom but to see it being applied in practice.

But often, customers don’t really know whether they have been successful or not, they quickly forget the metrics we’ve taught them to keep tabs on. They just don’t have time to track their own success.

By tracking for them, we help our customers put the training into practice and so see that our training has been effective. This increases customer loyalty, retention, and, importantly, word-of-mouth promotion of our services.

If we track accurately whether a customer is being more social we don’t need to be vague about the benefits of our service – we know for sure and importantly our customers know too.

Who is doing CST today?

CST as a discipline is in its infancy however there are one or two trail blazers out there. Take for example, property marketing firm, Zoopla. They run a CST program called the “Zoopla property power 100” which provides weekly feedback for its customers (estate agents) on their digital influence. Zoopla offers digital marketing services and tracks customer success in the form of digital marketing online influence (as measured using Klout). For the agents themselves it’s a valuable weekly reminder that they are being successful online. For more details of this program check out Zoopla’s Customer Success Tracking program on the Rise blog.

At Rise, we offer free CST programs for people to  improve their Twitter consistency, engagement and reach.

How should I start creating a CST program?

As social media trainers we are uniquely placed to take advantage of new CST platforms such as Rise.global – our first decision is whether to use an existing composite score (such as Klout) or to develop our own transparent tracking score (using Twitter and Instagram data). I would recommend first time CST’ers use Klout as it already has a sophisticated score algorithm.

Please note, you can still do Customer Success Tracking without using Rise – all you would need to do is maintain a spreadsheet and track everyone’s Klout score each week and then email them it – it’s a bit of a manual process but would still work!

However, I built Rise to automate that sort of thing, so, here’s what I would do:

1. Create a Twitter list of everyone who had been on my last training session.
2. Create a draft “Power 100” Rise board and add everyone on the list.
3. Switch the Rise board to “Private – Score Only” so that only I can see the leaderboard and players can only see their personal score.
4. Add email addresses for each of the “players” on my board and either invite them in or just subscribe them to the emails.
5. Send out a branded weekly email letting each player know their current Klout score and change from previous week.

What are the costs?

You will need to factor in some costs for your CST program, most of which will  be quickly recouped in marketing benefits and new sessions sold:

1. Graphic design for the program – you should create a logo and a badge that matches your training brand – i.e. “Toby’s Social Media Tracker”
2. Monthly DaaS and SaaS fees – if you use Rise and Klout this works out at around £0.07 / “player” / month. For 100 people on your program the fee is £7.99 per month. If you use other data then the cost varies but it’s usually manageable.
3. Email adverts and copy – the weekly email is a great place to upsell future courses so creating email ads to go in the email is vital.
4. Weekly tracking management time – it takes between 15 minutes and an hour a week (depending on the complexity of your score algorithm) to check the reports before sending them out to each player.
5. [Optional] Rise basic training – Rise offers a training session for anyone wanting to use the tool (if you’ve not run a CST program before this is really helpful) and costs £250.

Next steps

In conjunction with MarketMe, Rise is offering free CST training in 2016 for qualified social media trainers. If you’d like to book your slot for an online session then email [email protected] with subject “CST training – MarketMe” or you can contact me directly (@tobyberesford) via Twitter.