The Customer Signals Hidden Inside Your Social Care Data

[00:00:00] The Social Media Metrics You’re Missing

If your team is responding in under one hour, but your customers are still tweeting about that same issue three days later, then your response time metric is lying to you.

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Hey, hey, and welcome back to the Social Media CX Podcast. I’m your host, Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media, author of Conversations That Connect, and today we’re talking about your dashboard, specifically what it’s not telling you.

[00:00:33] Why Response Time Isn’t Enough

Here is what most social media teams are measuring: response time, follower count, engagement, follower count.

Maybe they’re looking at a CSAT score, if they’re lucky. And look, I totally get that. Those numbers are really easy to pull. A lot of times your directive is more followers, more followers, more followers. These things look good in a slide deck. Leadership is nodding along, and they love it when follower growth increases.

But these are not the social care metrics that tell you whether your program is actually working, whether you have a care program or just a social media program. Today, I’m gonna walk you through four social customer service metrics, again, whether you have a care program or you’re just doing social media, that are hiding in plain sight inside of your tools. Like Sprout Social or Khoros or Sprinklr, Emplifi. And these are the ones that most social media customer experience teams are not tracking but matter very much to your business.

Let’s get into it.

[00:01:44] Resolution Rate: The Social Care Metric That Matters

The first metric I wanna talk about is resolution rate. Response time, which is what a lot of people measure, tells you how fast your team replied. Resolution rate, which is what few people measure, tells you whether you actually solved someone’s problem; if you answered their question, if you helped them with what they were asking about.

Those are two very different things. What is resolution rate in social media customer care or social media customer experience? It’s the percentage of social care interactions that reached a definitive solution, either publicly or after moving to a private channel like a DM. If your team is responding in under one hour, but your customers are still tweeting about that same issue three days later, then your response time metric is lying to you.

It’s not telling you what actually matters to your customers. In Sprout Social, we track this through case management. In Khoros, it’s built into the care workflow reporting. But essentially, the number that you wanna look at is how many conversations moved from open to resolved, open to closed, and how long did that take from the first time they contacted you until you were able to close it out?

An example here is, if someone calls on, we have a luxury appliance brand. If somebody tweets us and says like, “Hey, I need to get service out,” right? And we say, “Great, we’re gonna connect you with service,” and we connect them with service, but their appointment isn’t for two weeks, that does not get closed until the service is completed.

We have to close that loop on social. “Hey, following up, how did your service go? I know the repairman came out today.”

“Oh, it was great.”

“Fantastic. Okay.”

Loop closed, right? That is resolution rate. We resolved that issue because service came out and fixed it, and now we’re closing the loop on social as well.

If you don’t know your resolution rate, you don’t know if your team is actually helping people. You just know that they’re typing fast, they’re responding fast, which is great, but it’s really surface. We’re not really solving the main issue.

[00:04:08] Deflection Rate: Are Your Chatbots Hurting CX?

The second metric I want you to think about is deflection rate, and this is a big for anyone managing AI or bots or tiered social care workflows.

What is deflection rate? Deflection rate essentially measures how many inquiries were resolved without ever needing a human agent. If done well, you’ve got good efficiency working. If done poorly, you’re probably killing trust.

So if you’ve got bots that are running workflows for you on your behalf, care workflows, support workflows, this is important. Because a high deflection rate on a simple transactional inquiry like order status or hours or basic account questions, basic FAQs, frequently asked questions, means that your human agents have more capacity for the complex, emotionally charged interactions where empathy is actually more important to move the needle.

But if your deflection rate is climbing, if it’s getting higher, meaning the AI needed to speak to a human, right? Somebody said, “I wanna talk to a human. I don’t wanna talk to the AI.” If that deflection rate is climbing and if your customer satisfaction score, CSAT score, is dropping, that could be a signal that your automation is handling things that it shouldn’t be.

So the two metrics together tell a story that neither one kind of tells alone. Look for an, a deflection rate that’s climbing, a CSAT rate that is dropping, and you’ve probably got an automation, you’re over-utilizing AI or automation to help your customers. If you track deflection monthly, you can see how it moves when your bot changes flows, or if you updated your automated responses, or if you add a bot into the picture.

It’s one of the clearest indicators of whether your automation is actually serving your customers or just helping your company reduce headcount and use AI. So that’s another really important one, especially right now.

[00:06:20] Sentiment Shift: How to Measure Customer Experience

The third metric that I wanna talk about is sentiment shift. So most social listening tools track sentiment.

Sentiment is just the positive, negative, or neutral feelings that someone has when they’re reaching out to your brand, having that conversation. And very few social cares use sentiment the right way. You’d be surprised at how little massive corporations know about sentiment.

Sentiment at a point in time is interesting. I know Brooke’s mad. I know Brooke’s happy. But sentiment shift over time is intelligence. So when we think about sentiment shift in social customer care, it’s the change in customer sentiment before and after a social care interaction.

So if a customer comes in frustrated but leaves neutral or positive, that’s a measurable outcome that your team just created. You just helped save that customer. That’s retention happening in real time measured by the sentiment shift, right? It’s also revenue protection.

The move here is to correlate sentiment shift data with your care team’s activity. So when response times go up, does sentiment go down? Does it get worse? When you deploy a new response protocol, or when you deploy maybe a chat bot like we were talking about earlier, does negative sentiment decrease the following week or in the weeks after?

Increase? Stay the same? Sentiment shift helps you turn social care or social customer experience from a cost center conversation into a value conversation. This is the exact language that your leadership team speaks. So sentiment shift is another big one that can help you get really far.

[00:08:20] Spot Customer Problems Before Everyone Else

And the last metric that we’ll talk about is the inquiry mix shift.

And this one is my personal favorite because almost no one measures this or pays attention to this. But inquiry mix in social care reporting is really just the breakdown of what people are asking for or saying across all of your social channels. So product questions, billing issues, complaints, compliments, general inquiries, fraud, security concerns… every category needs to get tagged, which we’ve talked a lot about tagging.

That’s number one, so you gotta be tagging. But all of these categories need to be tagged because the power move here is that you can track how that mix shifts over time. So say you have a sudden spike in billing inquiries. That is a product or a process problem that hasn’t surfaced yet probably with your support team or inside of your CRM.

A rise in “I can’t access my account” messages might be an app issue, and it might happen before your tech team even knows about it. I’ve told this story before. We work with a cash back app, and this is exactly what was happening. We started getting a lot of messages where people were saying, “Hey, I’ve been spending money, and I should be seeing like, the savings, you know, the dollar amount that I’m saving in my account.”

But it’s not there. Well, on the back end it was there, but on the front end it wasn’t there. The, customers couldn’t see it. It was a bug. And so we kept telling the client like, “Hey, are you sure there’s not a bug? Are you sure there’s not a bug?” Finally, we got IT to pay attention and not just look at the back end, look at it from a user point of view, and it was a bug.

It was something that we could easily fix. So that is a great example of that mix. If that mix is increasing, we need to sit up and pay attention. If it’s decreasing, maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it’s a bad thing. But a drop in complaint volume after you change something, so after we’d fixed that bug and the volume basically disappeared, it didn’t just drop, it went away completely because the bug was fixed, that is your proof that the fix or the policy change or whatever it was worked.

So your inquiry mix is kind of an early warning system. It helps you with product signals or trust signals. And when we’re talking about our financial services friends, a shift towards fraud or security inquiries is a big compliance flag that needs immediate escalation. This data lives in your tagging workflow, so I cannot stress it enough, y’all must be tagging all of these conversations that are coming in, in the first place.

If you’re not tagging inquiry types consistently, you’re not gonna be able to do this. So that’s your first fix. Once you’re tagging well, a monthly inquiry mix report takes about 20 minutes or so, and surfaces insights that literally no other team in your organization has access to. Y’all, that is leverage, and leverage in these days and times, it’s a good thing to have.

[00:11:40] 4 Social Media Care Metrics Every Team Should Track

So a quick recap for y’all. The four social care metrics that your dashboard is hiding that I want you to unhide and start paying attention to: number one, resolution rate. Did the issue get solved, not just answered quickly? Number two, deflection rate. How much is automation helping versus quietly hurting trust?

If you’ve got a lot of deflection happening, meaning people are in that workflow or inside of that bot saying, “I wanna speak to a human,” that’s deflecting to a human. If there’s lots of deflection, you’re automating too much, your bot’s not set up properly. It’s something that needs to be addressed. Number three is sentiment shift.

Yes, we wanna see sentiment. We wanna know if Brooke’s happy, if she’s sad, if she’s just meh, neutral. It’s really hard for me to be neutral, I’m sure you all know this. But how does that shift over time? How does that shift before or after an interaction? So you’re looking at how customer emotion changes before and after your team steps in.

And the last one is the inquiry mix. What Are your customers telling you or asking about before anyone else in the company knows that this is a thing? The inquiry mix will help you get that data.

[00:13:00] How a Social Care Audit Improves Customer Experience

Before I let you go, I wanna tell you about something we do at B Squared Media called the Social Care Audit.

If you’ve been listening to this episode and thinking, “I genuinely have no idea what our resolution rate is,” or, “We’re not tagging any inquiry types at all,” this is exactly what the audit is designed to surface for you. We go in, we look at your response times, we look at your coverage gaps, we check on your escalation paths, your inquiry mix, and we’ll tell you what’s working, what’s missing, and what’s costing you.

There’s no fluff, and there’s no generic recommendations. It’s just a clear diagnostic you can take to leadership to revamp your strategy, especially previous to 2027. Like, let’s get this done now because social’s changing fast, y’all.

If that sounds like something your team needs, head over to bsquared.media/social-care-audit. Find me on LinkedIn. Leave me a comment wherever you’re listening to this. We will make it work. I’ll also make sure the link is in the show notes wherever you’re watching or listening to the show.

So here is where I want to leave you today.

Response time absolutely matters. Like, number one, fix the response time. I’m not telling you to stop tracking that. But if that’s the only number in your social media or social care or social CX report, you’re handing leadership a single chapter and calling it the whole book. It is not. Resolution rate, deflection rate, sentiment shift, inquiry mix, and shifts on those, those are real social care metrics that help start telling that full story.

They connect your team’s daily work to customer retention, product health, and revenue, like business outcomes and other revenue. And y’all, they’re already sitting in your tools. You just gotta pull them.

I’d love to hear from you. What’s one social care metric your team tracks that leadership really pays attention to?

And I mean loves to pay attention to. Drop it in the comments wherever you’re watching or listening to this, or shoot me a note on LinkedIn, or just DM me directly. I would love to compare notes and maybe share your story on a future episode of the Social Media CX Podcast.

Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.