How Percolate and WD Enhanced Customer Support

ENHANCING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

WD, a leader among data storage providers since its founding in

1970, has always tried to use every interaction with its hundreds

of thousands of clients as a marketing opportunity. The company’s customer service team uses social media to respond

to their customer concerns, but has lacked the tools to effectively

use those channels to go beyond response management.

As WD expanded internationally, it faced greater complexity in

managing customer support across global teams.

WD’s customer support teams must respond to questions and

concerns on Twitter and Facebook in a variety of different

languages and across multiple time zones. Ensuring that every

inquiry was resolved and that every response was consistently on-brand globally was a challenge for WD. Moreover, the

company was operating with little visibility into customer

sentiment over time.

WD turned to Percolate to help them solve this important

challenge: how can a customer support team cut down response

time while ensuring all messaging is on-brand and meets

compliance regulations?

Number of Flags created in Percolate by WD’s US Customer Service Team

FLAGGING AND TRACKING CUSTOMER SENTIMENT

Percolate’s Monitoring tool provides marketers and customer support teams

a window into the most important online social conversations. WD uses this

tool to create custom, real-time streams of relevant search terms to monitor

conversations across social channels. Users can flag comments one-by-one

or en-masse, tag them with preset topics or sentiments, and assign the flag

to a specific team member to address. Percolate tracks flags and their tags,

yielding valuable trends and insights about WD’s time-to-resolution,

trending topics, and customer sentiment.

Percolate’s Client Solutions team worked with WD’s Customer Service team

to implement a monitoring and flagging workflow that matched existing

workflows and incorporated the use of tags and preset responses. After

rolling out this workflow in May 2015, WD’s US team moved the entire

monitoring and flagging process into Percolate in just 6 months and reduced

the average time of flag-to-resolution from 8.4 hours to 1.7 hours.

0

100

200

300

400

March April May June July

QUICKLY ISSUING ON-BRAND RESPONSES

Percolate enables teams to create and save responses that

have already been approved by necessary stakeholders,

ensuring responses are routing customers to the right party for resolution, pre-approved by legal, and maintain brand

consistency. With over 30 saved responses for both Twitter

and Facebook, the global team has a catalog of legally

approved responses to select from, allowing them to request

more information, offer the correct information, or ask a fan

to direct message them.

Before adopting Percolate, WD had an average response time

of 35 hours. In just 5 months, Percolate helped WD cut the

average response time by 35%. This reduction came largely from the team’s ability to use pre-written and pre-approved

responses when responding to customers.

ELIMINATING THE APPROVALS BOTTLENECK

Not all customer inquiries align with the pre-approved

responses. WD needed an efficient process to approve custom

responses, ensuring they are compliant and on-brand. To help with this, Percolate’s Client Solutions worked with WD to

map the existing approval workflows, roles, and permissions

to Percolate’s software.

Percolate’s approvals are fully customizable, with the ability

to batch approve multiple pieces of content, make any

changes prior to publishing, or send a post back to the content

creator for revisions. WD can also manage all approvals and

roles on the front-end of the software, empowering the global

team to reconfigure Percolate as changes arise.

The approval workflow was established in seven regions: US,

Latin America, Brazil, New Zealand, UK, India, and Australia,

giving customer support employees across all of WD’s

international locations the ability to write tailored response

to customers with manager approval.

With the Approver app, Katie can similarly ensure brand safety through

WD’s approvals process from anywhere. A designated approval manager can

browse through scheduled posts, approve posts, request changes to content, and leave feedback via a mobile device. All feedback is stored in the

conversation stream that is visible to all members of the marketing team.

Percolate’s fully featured mobile apps for iOS and Android means Katie is

able to manage the team’s responses across multiple time zones right from

her phone.

Once a response is approved, it can be logged and saved for the entire team to

use at a later date, saving the team time while maintaining WD’s brand voice.

THE BENEFITS OF A MOBILE WORKPLACE

WD’s Global Customer Support Social Media Specialist, Katie Wilson,

manages social interactions from the customer support perspective. Seven

regions around the world rely on Katie to ensure replies and outreach are

helpful and on-brand.

Percolate’s Approver and Community Manager apps allow Katie to work on

the go. Community Manager brings Percolate’s monitoring features to mobile,

allowing users to follow and respond to social conversations efficiently.

Community Manager offers the ability to toggle between licenses, build

custom audience lists, and flag messages. The app gives Katie access to WD’s

pre-approved brand messages, so the flagging and response workflow the

Customer Service team designed remains intact on her smartphone

“I love the Percolate mobile app suite. It makes it easy to approve posts while I am in meetings and on the fly.”— Katie Wilson, Global Customer Support Social Media Specialist at Western Digital

DELIVERING ON EFFICIENCY AND CONSISTENCY

By centralizing WD’s monitoring and responding needs in

Percolate’s desktop and mobile apps, the team can ensure

proper governance, monitor customer engagement, track responses and response times, and build stronger

relationships with the community.

WD’s customer support teams can now effectively unlock

response marketing tactics while streamlining the creation,

approval, and distribution processes for customer responses.

Percolate is The System of Record for Marketing. Our technology helps the world's largest and fastest-growing brands at every step of the marketing process.

Want to learn more?

Contact learn@percolate.com for more information

or request a demo today at percolate.com/request-demo