NelsonHall estimates that social media services outsourcing generated about $106 million in revenues in 2013, indicating that social media providers are following traditional media and other industries in taking advantage of the cost savings and domain expertise afforded by outsourcing to specialized firms located both locally and offshore. The biggest segment of social media BPO is customer experience enhancement (worth $40 million), featuring issue and complaint resolution services and finding customer service feedback on the web. This segment is expected to reach $497 million by 2018, with a compound average annual growth rate of 66 percent. Other social media BPO segments include revenue optimization (worth $11.5 million), which involves the use of social media data analytics to identify possible sales leads, social media monitoring, and market insight (Targeting Social Media Services’ CMS Program, NelsonHall 2013).

NelsonHall reports that many factors are driving market growth, such as businesses turning to different social media channels to engage their customers, improve issue resolution time, and improve overall customer experience by tracking the customer journey from beginning to end and exceeding expectations. In industries like retail, telecom, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare, customer relationships are increasingly shaped by social media.

Social media service providers are responding to this new business-customer dynamic by aggressively investing in capabilities and technology that help clients better understand the behavior and sentiments not only of their customers, but also of influencers on the internet.

According to Everest Group, providers are building their capabilities in social media monitoring, analytics, internal business intelligence, and advisory and consulting to enable their clients to have real-time awareness of changing customer viewpoints. A considerable number of big companies have partnered with social media monitoring and analytics firms to strengthen their social media offerings. Taking the step towards customer analytics is one way to evolve vendor services from mere operational processes to something more strategic.

Case Study: Social Media Solution for a Global Financial Services Provider. A global financial services company, with offices in over 50 countries and employing more than 65,000 people all over the world, previously had a system to monitor traditional mass media coverage (like newspapers). But the rise of Facebook and Twitter has left the company without the capacity or experience to manage and track the new digital environment. Aiming for a comprehensive, cost-effective social media solution to reduce complexity, the company partnered with a social media services provider for end-to-end social media monitoring services.

The service provider delivered global social media monitoring in English, Spanish, German and Portuguese languages for all the company’s markets and business functions, while also supplying analysis of tracked content by native speakers and regular, detailed reporting. First, the social media services provider developed a pilot project to understand the best social media monitoring strategy for the client. The project improved services and integrated these services into the company’s internal business processes. Next, the service provider designed an operating model that identified technology, processes, and human resources needed to implement the strategy. The new fully-functioning social media monitoring capability then went live in the Swiss market where the company has since taken over.

A mobile virtual network operator hired a service provider to improve customer experience through social media. The service provider handled forum management, helping boost the company’s customer satisfaction score to 85 percent and reduce client-customer interaction time (interactions were handled within six minutes). The service provider also delivered multichannel support through Twitter, email and voice, helping the mobile virtual network company increase its customer base by 400 percent and customer retention from 20 to 30 percent.

Although some communities allow a very open sharing environment, most businesses require all content submitted to their websites to meet the standards of the organization and reflect positively on their brand. Established firms often need sophisticated content moderation tools to ensure that user-generated content (UGC) is legal, age-appropriate, relevant, and improves rather than destroys the bottom line.

Industry analysts say that about 4 million minutes of video are uploaded to YouTube every day and more than 5 billion images are uploaded to Facebook every month. However, over 75 percent of uploaded videos and over 35 percent of images are inappropriate for business. User-generated content (UGC) has been created since the dawn of the internet, but the tremendous growth of UGC in recent years has led organizations to police their websites more proactively in order to identify bad content and prevent its distribution.

Online content moderation can be classified into three main strategies: automated moderation (using algorithms and applications), community moderation (moderation from the online community), and human moderation (through crowdsourcing or paid employees). Service providers often use tools and ISO process improvements to enhance the quality of user-generated content and make the review of text, image and video more efficient.

A social networking website and mobile application company matches like-minded people and helps them connect with friends in their vicinity. The website screens every image that users submit. Initially, two people were assigned to moderate content, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the volume. As a result, turnaround times grew longer. To speed up moderation and improve the user experience, the company worked with a content moderation provider.

The social networking website was also interested in a cost-effective solution that would increase customer retention. To address these requirements, the partner company provided 24/7, on-demand staff to handle the volume of content as well as an advanced technology platform. The solution allowed the social networking site to shorten the review process significantly without sacrificing the quality of the content review. The service provider’s review process involves three people reviewing each uploaded image and auto-crosschecking the decision made. This maximizes the quality of the data reported.

The service provider was able to reduce image review turnaround time to a maximum of only 10 minutes and also help the company save 20 percent on staffing costs; thus enabling them to divert resources to core activities. As the social networking site’s user community expanded and the volume of content further increased, the service provider’s scalable solution continued to deliver high-quality reports and fast turnaround.

Outsourcing social media moderation and other social media support services to the Philippines is a high-quality, cost-effective solution for businesses looking to reduce costs while maintaining a high level of service and user experience. Service providers such as Sourcefit in the Philippines offer scalable solutions for companies of various sizes in a wide range of industries.

Please contact us to find out about Sourcefit’s custom social media support solutions.