Last time, we looked at social media ROI based on customer insights. Today, we’re going to look at social media ROI based on customer support calls. Why? Customers often put value on customer support and it’s an easy way for you to track how well your social media campaign is doing at helping others and avoiding calls which cost money.

Let’s start by laying out our 3 step process. In this case:

#1. Our goal this time will be save on customer support money by minimizing calls to the customer support group. Incidentally, this will also help our profits as people prefer to deal with companies which don’t break down in the works, but that’s another discussion.

#2. In this case, we will be defining our return as the amount of dollars saved through minimal customer support.

#3. Link the hard dollar value to the savings by multiplying the average cost per call by the number of calls avoided.

Got that? Onward then!

Your current customer support group should know the cost of the average sort of call. InAmerica, the average cost is about ten to twenty five dollars, depending on the product, service, and other factors. It’s harder to figure out the number of support calls which were avoided, but there are two methods.

One, you can go through a customer support cost analysis based on the savings found through the use of a forum. You can base your estimates on things like the percentage of your customers in the forum and how many of them found their answers. From this, you can pull out the cost savings from calls that were never made as a result of better online work.

The other way to do this is akin to sales estimates. You can figure out the number of calls that there would be if you had no social media. Then over a period of time (say three months), you can track the number of support calls you get. The prevented support calls therefore is the difference between the predicted and actual support calls. Simple, but a little inaccurate, though most of these things are meant to just give you a picture of things anyway.

Now we are going to use our standard financial ROI formula. In this case, the amount of money it cost to have all of your support calls-investment divided by support calls. So, if you spent $1000 on support calls, invested five hundred into it, your ROI would be 50%.

Concluding Thoughts

These are three ways to figure out the social media return and ROI. These are sales, consumer insights, and customer support. Keep in mind that most campaigns do not include all three of these types of returns; you can use any one of them or a combination of them in order to figure out your social media return and thus figure out how far along you are with your goals for your social media campaign.

Thank you for reading! We’ll see you again in a couple of days with more business tips and tricks. And if you ever want to know more, you are more than welcome to contact us here at Posse Social Media.