GM, America’s largest automobile manufacturer, has more than 17 million social brand mentions and engages in more than 400,000 customer care conversations each year. GM set (and met) two aggressive goals to support their customer-centric vision.

Goal 1: Deliver on today’s customer expectations. GM recognized that customers are increasingly turning to social channels for customer service, and established a response time objective of less than three hours. To achieve this objective, GM leveraged AI to identify, categorize and prioritize social-driven customer care issues. From there, people take over: highly-trained moderators assign the posts to the advisor best suited to deliver a fast, accurate, and customized response. GM also deployed a chatbot to handle “easy to answer” inquiries (as determined by AI) without human intervention. The chatbot also collects necessary information on “difficult to answer” inquiries before they are passed to an advisor.

Goal 2: Push the boundaries of social care. The GM team set out to connect customers with the people making their products, to uncover actionable insights and improve the customer experience. They also wanted “early detection” of any product issues. GM harnessed AI to systematically mine social and digital conversations for product issues, engage the appropriate internal team to fix problems, and follow up with the customers who voiced the concerns. (In one example, GM learned that some Acadia owners saw a “shift to park” message after they had already shifted to park. GM began a collaborative, internal effort to deliver the proper repair strategy to dealerships. The team also reached out to affected customers and scheduled their repairs.)

GM’s efforts earned them a 2019 Shorty Award in the category of Customer Service. This prestigious award recognizes companies that are using social media to enhance the experience of their customers.

Source: GM’s award entry, “General Motors Social Customer Care,” by General Motors and FleishmanHillard.

Mentioned in the most recent edition of Contact Center Management on Fast Forward by Brad Cleveland.