“Webcare will no longer be a separate team, but will simply be part of the work of every 'role 3' employee.” It involves around twenty people in the Contact Centre, four of whom are already staffing webcare – a kind of social media evangelist. In addition, there is a web editorial team of six people at Communications & Marketing who take care of community management on Facebook and there are two press officers who manage @FNVBondgenoten.
How do you keep track of all those channels and team members?
Birgit: “Sometimes people call us first and then send us a Facebook message, or the other way around. We can search for someone’s full name in our customer tracking system to see if we’ve had contact with that member before. If I can’t see that on Facebook, I ask about it.”
Can you tell us more about the powers of the web carers?
“We distinguish three roles internally for our services. And we also adhere to these for webcare: in increasing order of difficulty, these are membership, employment law, and social security. So what we call webcare is hardly about the union itself, but is all about providing information about the work situations that people find themselves in.” Birgit: “I think it is because people have such extensive questions. It is more substantive than a question about your telephone bill, for example. There are legal issues about work, benefits or collective labour agreements. You simply need a wall of text for that.”
Distribution of questions about social media channels FNV Bondgenoten (in interview with Oliver de Leeuw)
Do you also give advice to non-members?
Irena: “Our policy is to do that, but to a certain extent. As a union, you are obliged to provide explanations of the collective labor agreement to everyone who falls under it. But we draw the line when someone asks for unpaid advice very often, because without members there is no union. Then we kindly point out the advantages.” Birgit: “We all have a legal education, so the common pitfall is to be long-winded out of care. We have consciously practiced that in the training.”
Members of FNV Bondgenoten are requested not to share sensitive information in public (in interview with Oliver de Leeuw)
Irena continues to talk about the strategic choices behind webcare: the main goal of using social media is to strengthen the relationship with the supporters, whereby webcare helps people on the channel of their choice. The business case is that satisfied members have a higher loyalty and therefore remain members longer. In addition, online visibility, especially in the recession, is increasingly important for the reputation of the association. “People do talk about you, but you can't respond to what you don't see!”
#Pension agreement: never waste a good crisis
As with many other large organisations, a small crisis was also the reason for FNV Bondgenoten to start webcare. The internal division between Agnes Jongerius and Henk van der Kolk about the pension agreement at the end of 2011 was 'overexposed' in the media. At that time, there were many heated conversations online, especially on Twitter.
But there was no policy yet on how to deal with that. With that, Irena was able to demonstrate how important webcare would be for the association. With an Excel overview of tweets, conversations and online sentiment in hand, she approached various decision-makers: “Look, this is a good reason to pick up webcare and do something with it. We are very big and a lot of people talk about us. And now that you and I see this, we can't just sit still, can we?” Irena then wrote a strategic advice, which led to the large-scale project that is now almost completed.
How did you then find the right people?
“Together with the managers of the Contact Center, we looked for colleagues south africa mobile phone number list who had a feeling for this, because webcare would eventually have to become an additional channel there. In addition, I did the same within the Communication & Marketing department for community managers, who play a supporting role in webcare. Then you just talk to people who like it, a kind of internal application with people from various departments. We also use clear criteria for the ideal webcare employee:
Ready knowledge of all subjects, and therefore knowing people in the organization for a short response time;
Experience with our CRM system;
Affinity with social media;
and want to be an ambassador for the organization.
Perhaps the most important thing is to be truly service-oriented. For us, empathy means that you know how to say something other than 'how annoying for you' every time. People want to be heard. It doesn't matter if it's on the phone or via Facebook.”
Enthusiastic FNV Bondgenoten member does not cancel his membership after all thanks to webcare (in interview with Oliver de Leeuw)
Is it true that you don't use standard answers?
“There are FAQs in use, but you can't cut and paste anything. Those answers are at most a guideline, because every situation is different. Our webcarers know everything about the union: the policy, legal knowledge, have an internal network and you need all that. We can't have all those substantive questions answered externally.”