The Hidden Risk in Your Social Media Customer Experience

[00:00:00] Why most brands think they’re doing social care right

Speaker: Social has fundamentally changed. This is where it’s going. It’s becoming an experience channel, not a content distribution channel.

Speaker: hey y’all. Welcome back to the Social Media CX show, where we explore how brands protect trust, improve customer experience, and turn conversations into measurable business impact. I’m your host, Brooke Sellas, and today I’m going solo.

No guest, just me, a little bit of data and a framework that I think every CX customer experience and marketing leader needs to hear before, not after, they make another investment in social media.

Because here is what I and the team here at B Squared Media keep running into. Brands think they’re doing community management, engagement, or what we call social care on social. Because they’re responding to comments. They have a community manager. Maybe they even have a tool like Emplifi or Sprout Social or Sprinkler in place.

They genuinely believe they’re in good shape, like literally. But when we come in, and we dig in, whether it’s with an audit or just bringing us on as an outside vendor. And I mean, when we really dig in, what we find is a significant gap between where they think they are and where they actually are. And guess what?

[00:01:31] The gap between perception and reality

Speaker: That gap has a name. We call it the B Squared Social Care Maturity Model. And today I’m gonna walk you through all five levels straight from our 2026 State of Social Care report. So by the end of the episode, you’re going to know exactly where your brand sits, and more importantly, you’re going to know what it takes to level up.

How do we get to that next level? Let’s get into it.

Before I walk you through the model, I wanna give you a little context on why this matters. Chapter Seven of our 2026 State of Social Care report asks leaders to answer these three questions. Number one. Who owns social care inside of your organization? And if you don’t have it labeled as social care, it just means who owns managing the conversations that happen on social?

So conversations might happen on a post that you publish. They might happen through somebody DMing you or sending you a private message on social. You might get tagged or mentioned on social when somebody uses little at tag and then tags your brand and mentions you that way. But there are also… that’s all reactive, right?

There are also proactive ways that you can look for people talking about you through social listening. So when people are mentioning your brand, your products, your services, your stakeholders, but not at tagging you or mentioning you on social, they’re still talking about you though. The second question is, how mature is your current operation?

Doesn’t matter if you know or not. Just make an educated guess. And the third question is, what does good actually look like for you? Good means something different for everyone. Social care means something different for all the brands we work with. So what does good look like for you? Now what we find is that most brands can answer that first question, sort of.

But that second and that third question are where things get a little murky. Now, here’s the truth you probably don’t wanna hear. Most mid-market and enterprise brands sit somewhere between a Level One and a Level Three on our model. The leaders who are going into this year and beyond are trying to move into Levels Four and Five really quickly.

So let’s talk about where the levels actually are, and maybe you’ll start to understand where you might sit.

[00:04:03] Level 1: Reactive (and the risks)

Speaker: Level One on our maturity model is called reactive. The telltale sign here is that you’re responding when you’re tagged. Like when someone’s mentioning you, they come on that post or they send you that dm, we are responding most of the time. Usually, for the most part. 90% of the time.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone at this level. There is no real formal ownership of social care. Monitoring is manual. Tone is probably inconsistent from one response to the next. You might even have different people responding at different times, and if they’re not following any sort of brand guideline, their own personal tone of voice is what comes out as the tone.

Maybe it takes a long time for you to respond to these tags, mentions, or comments that you receive. And if something gets publicly escalated, like a complaint, turns into a little bit of a fire. That’s probably common. You probably see this pretty often. Now, the risk at level one is pretty significant because when you are reactive, crises unfold in real time.

This means that your brand’s perception is being shaped by randomness. Whoever happened to see that comment, whoever had time to respond that day, whoever flagged that there was a little crisis unfolding on social. You are not actually driving experience in a level one reactive mode. The experience, unfortunately is driving you.

[00:05:37] How to move from Level 1 to Level 2

Speaker: So how do you move from Level One to Level Two? Start with assigning clear ownership. Establish your SLA: service level agreements. Even basic ones, meaning we’re going to respond within an hour. If you can’t do that within three, if you can’t do that within 48, whatever it is, you could do. Set those guidelines and assign clear ownership. Standardize your tone, your brand tone, so that every response sounds like it’s coming from the same brand. Your brand.

[00:06:11] Level 2: Connected (where most teams stall)

Speaker: Now when we get into Level Two, we call the this connected, and here’s where brands start to feel like they’re doing the thing. So we have a social care team or a social media monitoring team, a community management team. Again, whatever you call it. But the workflows are probably siloed. At this level, you have the basics.

You are responding, but social care might be owned by support or marketing or social, but not all three working together. Conversation, categorization, or what we call tagging is limited. And the metrics that you’re tracking are probably focused on things like handle time, the volume of inquiries that you receive, the volume of responses that you’re pushing out.

How quickly you’re responding. And that’s all fine, right? But it’s all fine until you realize what you’re missing. And what you’re missing are high effort customer experiences. So this means there’s inconsistent knowledge sharing. There are intent signals that are slipping right through the cracks.

‘Cause notice I didn’t mention anything about sales being involved. And the biggest problem at level two isn’t what you’re doing wrong. It’s just what you can’t see. And the path from going from level two to level three is integrating your tools, unifying your dashboards, building escalation paths that actually connect those teams: sales, marketing, product, support is what we usually see.

There’s also legal and HR who might be involved. And then once you sync those teams and those systems, you are at a minimum giving kind of this weekly touch base weekly dashboard if you want. We call it a weekly “what we heard” loop that all of those teams have access to and can glean information from.

[00:08:05] Level 3: Integrated (and why it’s not enough)

Speaker: Level Three is called integrated, and this is where things really start to feel functional because this is where social care is aligned to the customer experience. And marketing. But it’s not yet predictive. So at Level Three, you have a unified voice and tone all across channels. Doesn’t matter which channel somebody reaches out to you on, you’ve got this unified tone and voice.

You’ve got insights that are being shared between customer experience or CX, marketing, product, sales, brand, right? All of those teams are working together. Escalation workflows are really clear. AI is being used for suggested replies. It’s maybe used for triage and automatic routing based on words that are used inside of complaints or compliments.

And this is a big one, you’ve got proactive social listening in place. That last piece is what makes you connected. If you’re not using social listening to be proactive, you cannot be a level three. Because at Level Three for the first time, brands start seeing the full conversation landscape. Not just who’s talking to them, but who’s talking about them.

And that’s where social care starts to shift from a ticket queue to an intelligence function. And we want everybody to be at least a level three because everybody needs an intelligence function. Now, here is the risk at Level Three. You’ve got a lot of data, like a lot. And not enough decisions. You’re still partially reactive.

And so the path forward from Level Three to Four is adopting experience metrics, refining your tagging, training AI on tone and intent and not just keywords. And again, you’re having that weekly loop. It’s that “what we heard” loop, or it’s a dashboard. Again, it looks different for everybody, but we like to call it the, “what we heard” loop. This is to share insights across the organization because customer behaviors are happening in real time.

[00:10:22] Level 4: Predictive (where things start to shift)

Speaker: So reporting on it monthly, and god forbid quarterly, just isn’t going to cut it. Now Level Four is called predictive. And this is the gap between where good and great brands, the ones we talk about all the time, really starts to emerge. So it might sound like if you’re Level Four: “we identify patterns before they escalate and before customers churn.”

Because at this level you have a motion based routing. AI is being used for summarization and pattern detection. So you’re tracking those little shifts. And sentiment in real time, and you’re tracking what we call trust velocity, meaning as we give people the answers to the questions they’re asking, did it help add trust or did it take away trust from the equation?

Obviously, in a Level Four, you’re probably adding trust, which is what we call trust velocity. This is also where pre-purchase intent signals are tied to your CRM. So when people on social media is comparing your product to a competitor’s product or saying like, “Hey, does this come in my size?”

You’ve got that tagged inside of your CRM or inside of some other tool, so that those cross-functional loops between teams, between CX, marketing, sales, products, are happening weekly.

If your frontline social care team isn’t able to sell that person who’s giving you that pre-purchase intent signal, how quickly a sales coming in and helping you route or close that deal? This, as you probably are realizing isn’t customer service anymore. This is intelligence at scale.

The risk at Level Four is just that you have sophistication, but it may not be fully consistent. The human and AI sides of your operation need constant calibration. It’s an iterative process. It’s not a set it and forget it. So to move from a Level Four to a Level Five. We have to start investing in what we call conversation design. Which is where we’re aligning our social care operation with our community strategy. And building direct revenue attribution so that the business can see the ROI. Social selling is a big part of being Level Four, and of course Level Five.

[00:12:50] Level 5: Experience-led (the ultimate goal)

Speaker: Now Level Five, which is the top level… I have not yet seen a Level Five in my midst… is called Experience Led. This is where competitive advantages are abundant because social care is a strategic engine for trust, loyalty, and revenue.

So at Level Five, care, marketing, sales, product, brand, legal, HR… They’re all sharing single conversation intelligence systems or a dashboard. AI models are trained on your best in class human responses. Emotional safety is intentionally designed into every interaction.

Predictive care is informing your product roadmaps, and you have a direct revenue attribution model enabled. The outcomes? Higher retention, lower cost to serve stronger advocacy, higher social driven conversations, reduced crisis exposure. And elevated brand trust across the brand. Level Five sounds like a fantasy, but it isn’t. It just requires treating social care as a system and not a channel.

[00:14:12] Where most brands actually are

Speaker: Hmm. Now here’s what I want you to sit with after you’ve listened to this episode. Most brands believe they’re at a Level Three or a Level Four. We’ve done a lot of social care audits over the past nine years… essentially that’s just a deep diagnostic of response times, coverage gaps, escalation paths, inquiry mixes, you know, risk exposure…

What we actually find when we’re looking at these things is that most brands are actually operating at a Level One or Level Two. And look, this is not because of the team or a people problem. It’s not because these brands don’t care, because they do. But it’s because they’ve never had someone hold up a mirror and show them the gap or the opportunity.

They don’t even realize that they could get to a Level Five or that there was a Level Five at all. This is exactly by the way, what our social care audit is designed to do, and it’s why we built the social care maturity model. Not to make anybody feel behind, but to give leaders a clear, honest picture of where they are and a concrete path to where they need to go next.

It’s a playbook, it’s a roadmap. If you wanna go deeper on this, and I mean really deeper, go read the full 2026 State of Social Care. It’s been available. We launched it earlier this year. All five maturity levels are in there. We’ve got the ownership models, the experience metrics that you should be tracking, the data behind every insight that I shared today.

You can download it for free at our website, B Squared Media. I’ve also got the link on the show notes, so anywhere you’re listening or watching this, just check out the transcript and you’ll see a link to that there. It’s totally free, so please go ahead and download it.

[00:16:00] Why social is becoming an experience channel

Speaker: And if you’re listening to this and thinking, I don’t actually know where we land on this model. Or that we have a model at all. That’s worth paying attention to. That is the whole point. Social has fundamentally changed. This is where it’s going. It’s becoming an experience channel, not a content distribution channel.

So if you wanna keep up up, read this report and maybe let’s talk about a social care audit. And as always, if this show is helping you think differently about customer experience, please rate and review us. It helps us bring on more brilliant voices and keeps this community growing with intention. Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.

Brooke Sellas | @brookesellas: Thanks for tuning in to the Social Media CX podcast. If you loved today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who needs to up their social care game.