Social Media Intelligence Serving Customer Care and the Whole Company

The SEB Group was founded in 1857 and is the world leader in small electrical appliances. With over 32,000 employees throughout the world and premises in almost 150 countries, it reported revenues of 5 billion euros in 2016. 2017 was a year of transformation for the Group that aims to accelerate the digitalization of its activities in order to support its growth.

SEB’s offering, with over 40 product families, is wide-ranging and diversified, thanks to its R&D strategy’s emphasis on innovation and technology. It includes an increasing number of connected products that reflect the Group’s mission: to facilitate and embellish consumer’s day-to-day lives and contribute to people’s quality of life all worldwide.

The SEB Group, which already had various social media accounts in order to be closer to its products’ users, noticed a 10% rise in the number of questions and complaints directed at customer service. This was a natural evolution linked to changes in consumer behavior but one the company was not necessarily prepared for, particularly in terms of human resources able to guarantee the appropriate response within a satisfactory timeframe.

Advocating values such as a sense of responsibility, solidarity and commitment, the SEB Group asked Valtech to help improve its interactions with social media.

Social media intelligence experts from the digital agency were mobilized in France, the Netherlands and Denmark.

42% of consumers who ask a question on social media expect an answer within the hour, so response time was crucial for SEB. Workshops were organized to devise and implement a methodology for collating and sorting through information. Consumer requests were sorted into four levels based on their complexity. The agency defined sorting tools, processes and governance and designed a scorecard with KPIs divided into four categories: signals, performance, satisfaction and productivity. The objective was to optimize the way different parties work together, with a better division of labour to be more efficient.

Valtech also recommended building a system that would connect social media and e-reputation monitor Brandwatch, social media management tool Hootsuite, and eventually CRM leader Salesforce, to completely master the brand’s interactions with consumers.

The agency took a step further in its commitment, creating a customer journey using a prototype or Proof of Concept (PoC), limited at first to just a few brands and subjects, two social media platforms (Twitter and Facebook), and one territory (France).

Premise of a true ecosystem, the Proof of Concept will eventually be extended to all social media platforms and all the company’s brands, as well as to other European countries: a multi-pronged social media intelligence industrialization project! Transversal to the Group, it will automatically oblige everyone to work under a new system of governance. In the end, the company will have shifted from social media listening to a holistic view of the consumer with a consolidated customer journey, a far cry from a simple system for managing complaints and answering questions.