Your guide to improving onboarding resolutions, and customer satisfaction with enterprise social.

1. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
How to Work Like a Network: For
the Customer Support Professional
Your guide to improving onboarding, resolutions, and customer
satisfaction with Enterprise Social
ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

2. Introduction
Part One:
Checking the Vital Signs
Part Two:
Stepping Up to the New Normal
Part Three:
Customer Support = Employee Support
Table of
Contents
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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social
networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of
people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.
The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar
applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other
application or service that matters to your company.

3. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
For many customers, the most powerful human
interaction they will have with your company is
through the customer support team. Even if your
brand is strong, customer sentiment will be
galvanized in their times of need by positive or
negative experiences.
Your team’s role is critical, because a customer’s support experience can have
a potentially significant impact on the bottom line. You are the nurses of the
business world: You remedy problems, prescribe methods for making things
better, and care for customers with compassion.
Continual progress requires the smart integration of Enterprise Social tools
into customer support. According to research organization The Social Habit,
social media is already considered one of the “Big 3” support modalities, along
with phone and email.
Today, when customers have a problem, they expect a rapid response from
customer support, personalized service from knowledgeable and well-trained
staff, and a satisfying solution tailored to their individual situation. They
deserve nothing less.
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“Simply put, if you don’t
use social media for
support, you’ll fall behind.”
—Social Media Survey,
The Association of Support Professionals

4. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR BUSINESS LEADERS
This e-book’s objective is to show you how to provide better customer support
using Microsoft Enterprise Social. First, it describes the tools and the value of these
solutions to your customer support team. Second, it presents three common
customer support situations and demonstrates how Enterprise Social can improve
all three in ways that can help your team have a greater impact on business growth
and profitability.
Finally, it shows you how to get started working like a network to become a more
informed, connected, and successful customer support team.
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5. Checking the Vital Signs
Part One:

6. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
The Value of Enterprise Social for
Customer Support
By applying the power of social networking to your
customer support team, you can:
• Streamline and centralize the onboarding
process for new support representatives.
• Improve quality and speed of response time
with customer resolutions.
• Boost employee morale, and in turn help
employees better serve customers.
With Enterprise Social, you can make easy-to-use
tools available to your team. Helping everyone in
your company to work like a network can help you,
as a customer service professional, address some
of the most significant challenges that your team
may face.

7. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Broaden Your View
Enterprise Social makes it possible for customer support teams to:
• Empower customers and decrease call volume: Support
teams can set up Yammer Groups in which customers can
engage with other customers and product experts online to
resolve issues.
• Make good use of and easily access company experts:
Staff can easily escalate difficult questions using Lync instant
messaging and technical issues to internal experts when
answers and solutions are not readily available.
• Gather business insights: Listen to and participate in
conversations inside and outside your organization to gather
valuable insights about your products and services with
Microsoft Social Listening.
• Free support reps to deal with difficult issues and
high-value customers: By providing various for ways for
you and your team to manage more routine calls with less
manpower, Enterprise Social frees you to spend your time
where it will do the most good.
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Workers who use
Enterprise Social
technologies experience
76 percent more visibility
into other company
departments or locations.
—Business Insights, Yammer
76%

8. Stepping Up to the New Normal
Part Two:

9. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Customer support has changed
dramatically over the past decade.
With the rise of social and mobile
technologies, consumers are now
armed with user reviews, peer
recommendations, and a wealth
of other information that changes
how they shop and make buying
decisions. That, in turn, is changing
the way many organizations
do business, including new
approaches to customer support.
It’s up to support professionals on the ground day
in and day out to establish the new norms. Across
all industries, we see new normals all the time—
things that were not commonplace just a few
years ago. You can buy blueberries in February;
check your email on an airplane; watch a toddler
navigate a tablet. This is the new normal, and it’s
changing constantly.
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10. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Today, it’s normal for customers to expect a faster-than-ever response time. The Social Habit survey found that over half
of customers expect a response to problems posed over social media, no matter what time of day or week. The idea of
office hours is fading as we increasingly access technology beyond the traditional “9 to 5.”
It’s also normal for customers to share their experiences widely and easily through social media. Research from
Entrepreneur.com says 58 percent more people are likely to share their customer experiences than five years ago. Of
those, 95 percent share bad customer service experiences, and 45 percent do so through social media.
You set the standard for what a normal customer experience is. That means that you may need to create an updated
blueprint for the things you do every day. Enterprise Social will help you help your customers—and here’s how.
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There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire
everybody in the company from the chairman on down,
simply by spending his money somewhere else.
—Sam Walton, Walmart founder

11. Onboarding New Reps
All new employees face a learning curve. They might be overwhelmed by the amount of new information and are trying
to remember where various resources are located. It is in everyone’s best interest that the onboarding process be as
smooth as possible.
Enterprise Social technologies can help get everyone speaking the same language. Ensure a consistent message, a
common team culture, easy access to centralized data, and integration of the new team members with the existing
employees.
Your company will provide better customer support if all the new hires are up to speed and have access to the resources
they need. Liz Ratto, a senior escalation engineer at Microsoft, says, “We store all of our onboarding documentation
on Yammer. We can link to the profiles of people within the organization, to other notes, and to files on the network
seamlessly. It helps daisy-chain it all together in a central location.”
69 percent of new hires are likely to stay longer than three
years if they experience well-structured onboarding.
—Aberdeen Group
I
MY JOB
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12. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
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Like a family doctor, support professionals have a wide range of knowledge, but also know when to reach out for more
specialized expertise. Just as your doctor may refer you to a dermatologist or endocrinologist, so support reps should
take a big-picture view and know who to turn to for additional information.
Ratto says, “With Yammer, we’re able to illustrate in a much more visual way how all of our teams are connected. By
having these central repositories where we keep all of our team-level documentation, we can easily link out to the other
folks in the organization who help us do our jobs every day.”
Ways Enterprise Social Can Streamline
Your Onboarding Process3
Centralize It
Create a centralized communication
and document repository for new reps
to learn procedures and best practices.
Create a Yammer Group called
“Support Onboarding” where you can
pin important documents and links and
give group updates in the feed.
Manage Your
Documents
Tap into organizational knowledge
from any location by using a unified
document management system within
Microsoft Dynamics CRM, gaining easy
access to contact, account, lead, or
opportunity records.
Pinpoint the Experts
Quickly find subject matter experts
within your company or department
and get immediate, timely responses
to help make decisions and get
answers faster. Get instant answers to
your questions from a colleague using
Lync IM or video conferencing for
more complex problem solving.
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13. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Resolving Customer Issues
Among respondents to The Social Habit who have ever contacted a brand, product, or company through social media for
customer support, 32 percent expect a response within 30 minutes, and 42 percent expect a response within 60 minutes.
Resolving customer issues is at the heart of what your team does. Doing it well comes down to two factors:
speed and quality.
Speed is critical, because customers should not be left wondering whether their request has been noticed. We’ve all heard
horror stories about a customer complaint posted to Twitter on a Friday that wasn’t addressed until Monday. You need
to hear what problems are coming up in real time, so they can be triaged and treated appropriately. It’s hard to undo the
damage caused by a vocal customer who has had a negative experience. On top of that, that same squeaky wheel could
have been a vocal advocate had they received a better support experience.
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80 percent of workers who use Enterprise Social
technologies are more informed about what is
happening inside their organization.
—Business Insights, Yammer
80%

14. 1313
Nip It in the Bud
Proactively resolve customer issues before they become an incident, with Microsoft Social
Listening. You can find out what’s top of mind for customers and what’s trending among
prospects by noting customized hashtags or handles.
Know Your Customer
Capture, store, and access all relevant customer data. Yammer is integrated with Microsoft
Dynamics CRM, enabling employees to analyze and interpret customer feedback and trends with
your team’s collective brainpower and together determine next steps.
Know Who You’re Looking At
Meet face to face without the cost of travel. Lync video conferencing improves collaboration by
establishing more trust between your team members and customers.
Share the Lessons
Create a folder in OneDrive for storing and sharing insights and learning from fellow teammates
about successes, best practices, and lessons learned. Yammer Document Conversations let
employees comment on a file as they’re viewing it so managers can address questions as soon as
they come up.
Teach Them to Fish
Help customers save time and find quick answers to their questions before seeking formal
support. Use Yammer networks to post general information and address FAQs as easily-
accessible resource for customers.
Ways Enterprise Social Improves
Knowledge Sharing and Customer
Resolutions
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5Ratto says, “We use Yammer
external networks to engage with
customers and collect information
quickly from all over the world
at the same time. It’s easy to
crowd source information about
customer experiences that we
should know about. It closes that
feedback loop faster than in a
traditional support model.”
But customers don’t just want fast
responses, they want responses
that are personal, thoughtful, and
accurate. You might not know the
answer to every question that
comes up, but someone in your
company does. Ratto says, “We’re
very likely to share our expertise
and knowledge. You just don’t
see information hoarding in this
type of culture that you might in a
more traditional siloed culture.”

15. “With Yammer, our ability to
understand and then react to
a problem or build on an idea
sped up dramatically. There’s
no question we can serve our
members better.”
—Greg Moran, SVP and CIO,
Infrastructure and Operations,
Nationwide Insurance
Acclaimed author and poet Maya Angelou observed, “They may forget your
name, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” It’s up to support
professionals to connect with customers and help them feel truly cared for.
Enterprise Social gives context to strangers, and makes the interaction
more personal.
“When we see people’s profile photos and can speak to them more casually
than over email, it helps us remember that a customer is a real person.
Employees naturally feel more empathy and more a sense of customer
advocacy. With Yammer, we feel a great sense of accountability to our
customers,” says Ratto.
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16. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Boost Employee Morale
Employees that are happy in their job are far more likely to provide high-quality customer service. Higher employee
morale means lower turnover, which means lower operation costs for your company.
One challenge to employee morale is how to build camaraderie. Coworkers may be on the same team, but often do not
work together in the same office or see each other face to face.
Liz Ratto says, “My team is spread out across the whole globe, and we work across different time zones. We have a lot of
remote workers who don’t interface even weekly with other team members. So having space for open discussions about
work bridges those geographical gaps and makes us feel much more like a cohesive team.”
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“When you take great care of your team members, you know
they’re going to take great care of your guests. That’s why we
chose Yammer, so we can provide that additional support that
we didn’t have before.”
—Jessica Elliot, Communications and Deployment Manager, Red Robin

17. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
And it’s not all about work. Enterprise Social tools can act as a virtual company water cooler. Ratto says, “If you see
something amusing on the web, you can share it with your team and all enjoy something together.”
But so what? Your reps might recognize faces on their team overseas and share cat videos, but how could that possibly
matter for business?
“Because we do feel so connected, we’re really likely to jump in and help one another out. It encourages openness and
frank communication that enables people to be themselves and help others the best that they can on Yammer. We can
be transparent with each other and with the rest of the organization, and that trickles down to our customer.”
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Ways to Create a Unified, Customer-centric Culture
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Combine Powers
You can marry learning, operation
services, and tech management on
Yammer. The project management
office can make sure there is continuity
across departments so collectively this
group can inform all changes to the
customer experience.
Flip the Pyramid
Enact change in the intersection where
employees meet customers. With
Yammer, all employees have a voice,
and ideas can be shared from the
bottom up.
Get Invested
Yammer allows employees to report
on conditions or situations and get an
audience with company leadership,
which in turn encourages further
workforce participation.
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18. Customer Support = Employee Support
Part Three:
Star tStar t

19. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
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A customer’s support experience
can have a resounding effect on
your organization. According
to loyalty marketing expert
Frederick Reichheld, even a 5
percent decrease in customer
dissatisfaction can boost profits
by up to 95 percent. Yet, acquiring
a new customer can cost six to
seven times more than retaining
an existing one. The bottom line:
You want to keep the customers
you have, and keep them happy.
But first you have to care for your team, before
they can most effectively help customers.
Whether getting new hires up to speed, finding
resources to answer customer inquiries, or
encouraging a positive team environment,
Enterprise Social tools can support you as you
deliver excellent customer support.

20. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
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Microsoft is a longtime and trusted partner for IT. Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies enable companies to
engage, inform, and connect their employees, partners, and suppliers, and were awarded the top position in Gartner’s
2014 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. There are three primary reasons that more than 400,000
organizations have chosen Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies to improve their business:
• Enterprise-grade technology built for business – Microsoft offers companies the experience, global
footprint, security, and reliability they expect from enterprise cloud solutions.
• A comprehensive and connected platform – Microsoft offers a comprehensive and deeply connected
platform for delivering seamless social experiences across many familiar applications as well as
customers’ data centers, service providers, and the Microsoft public cloud.
• Familiar and intuitive user experience and applications – Microsoft provides consistent, familiar, and
intuitive applications across its cloud solutions to drive faster, lower-cost implementation and high user
adoption, which lead to improved productivity and better business results.
To work like a network and learn about tools that help you improve onboarding,
resolutions, and customer satisfaction, visit www.enterprisesocial.com.

21. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT
www.enterprisesocial.com