The Benefits Of Integrating Social Media In Cloud For Service – Twitter Integration.

SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) consists of three pillars:

• SAP Cloud for Sales
• SAP Cloud for Service
• SAP Cloud for Social Engagement

In this blog we will highlight the benefits of using Social Engagement in relation with SAP Cloud for Service. Whereas the areas of Sales and Service are extensively discussed and reviewed the Social Engagement part is not that known by the C4C user community. The blog will consists of two parts where part 1 will describe the advantages of Cloud for Social Engagement whereas part 2 will focus on setting up the integration between Twitter and SAP C4C.

Cloud for Service without Cloud for Social Engagement already provides a very useful insight for service organizations, who aim to optimize customer loyalty and customer retention while reducing support costs by increasing their service handling efficiency.
The process steps for ticketing in C4C are as follows:

When integrating Cloud for Social Engagement with Service the process will not change however there are more ways to gather and share information increasing the way organizations can offer support to and connect with their customers.

Advantages of Social Engagement in C4C

Social Media is still booming and by including social channels, like Twitter and Facebook, your company will be able to exceed customer expectations and deliver the best customer service. Social media provides organizations the opportunity to engage directly with their (potential) customers, at any time and at any place. When integrating Social Engagement, all Social Messages of customers addressed to the organizations social channel are immediately turned into tickets in C4C enabling service agents to process these tickets and respond adequately.

If organizations are able to use social media as a two-way communication channel, this will lead to building relationships which will benefit the organization. There are several advantages of integrating Facebook and Twitter with Cloud for Service:

• Retrieve social media data and automatically detect sentiments of these data / messages
• Provide internal employees the opportunity to (better) engage with your “social followers” directly from within SAP C4C through social media channels
• Building complete overview of social media interaction history for customers / prospects and thereby identifying the biggest influencers
• Listen to what your customers are saying about your product, services, and brand
• Ability to identify and prioritize social media messages and respond quickly
• Build brand reputation using social channels and increasing customers loyalty online
• Understand who your customers are and the context of their posts / comments
• Customer feedback can be used to improve product development process
• Analyze the results of your social media interactions and track trends

The combination of Cloud for Service and Social Engagement has advantages for the organization itself, their employees, but surely for their customers as well. Customers will get the service they deserve, service employees have all the information at hand and the service manager can analyze data to improve products and processes.

Limitations

At this moment Social Engagement is only available in a B2C scenario, meaning that social profiles are only maintained for individual customers. It is unfortunately not possible to link Social Media Messages and Social Profiles on accounts or contacts in the B2B scenario.

There is also a the risk of, while trying to protect and enhance your brand image, outgoing Social Media Messages to your customers are mistaken and therefore will negatively influence your brand image. A handbook how to deal with Social Media within your organization could be useful to align your social media strategy and give a guideline on how to react on social posts.

Setting up Twitter Integration in SAP C4C

In this second part of the blog will show how to set up the integration between Twitter and SAP C4C.  In order to be able to see Social Media Messages in the C4C system it is required scope your implementation project accordingly. To begin, go to:

Business Configuration > Implementation Projects > highlight the appropriate project and choose Edit Project Scope. In the scoping expand Service > Customer Care and enable Complaint Management, Communication for Customer Care, Analysis for Customer Care and Service Request Management. 

After enabling these options go through the Questions under these scoping elements and enable the question “Do you want to support direct messages for Facebook channels? Hereafter confirm and finish the scoping.

Create a Twitter Application

For setting up the integration with Twitter, you will need the Twitter API key for your account.
The steps below will explain how you will create the twitter API key. 

1. In Twitter, go to the Developers area of the Twitter account under Settings.
2. Select the option ‘Manage your apps’ to set-up the connectivity from a Twitter perspective.
3. Select Create New App and fill in all the details needed to create the application.
The application name and description are not bound to any restrictions except to a maximum character length. The website and the callback URL is your Cloud for Customer tenant URL.  Accept the Developer Agreement and click on Create your Twitter Application.

4. After filling in the details and the creation of the Twitter Application go to Permissions where you select the box Read, Write and Access direct Messages.
5. Open the tab Keys and Access Tokens where you will be able to see and copy the API keys that are generated.

Create new Social Media Channel

After setting up the connection on the Twitter side it is required to create a new social media channel in C4C. The 4 following steps need to be executed.
1. As an administrator open C4C using Microsoft Silverlight and go to Administrator or Beta Administration – Service and Social and select Social Media Channels and hereafter click on the New button.

2. Setup the new media channel by filling in the Channel Type, Consumer Key, Consumer Secret and Log Level. The Consumer Key and Consumer Secret are copied from the newly created Twitter Application.
3. Select Connect with Channel. In a new browser authorization is asked for SAP C4C to communicate with the Twitter Account, where you need to select ‘Authorize App’. Cloud for Customer will trigger a notification that confirms the connection between C4C and Twitter.  Click on Get Account Details to automatically fill in the Twitter channel and manually fill in the ID, Language and possibly the Block Responses and Twitter Account for Responses (so all responses will be from one central Twitter Account) as well.
4. Save and Close the social media channel setup after all details are filled in.

Create Import Run and Schedule Communication Job

After creating the Social Media Channel it is necessary to schedule a communication job to retrieve all relevant Twitter messages. Follow the 4 steps below to create an import run and schedule a job.

1. To create a run and schedule a job, open the Social Media channel by clicking on the channel ID.
2. When the Social Media channel is opened, select the option ‘Create Run’ to create a new background job that runs periodically and collects the Twitter Messages. Enter the run description and see if the correct Social Media channel is automatically added and otherwise add the channel manually. Save and Close the import run.

3. The last step is to schedule a new job. There are several scheduling options but for Social Media Channels like Twitter and Facebook it is best to select the option “Recurrence” and “By the Minute”. After scheduling click Save and Close to return to the Social Media Channel itself.

4. Check if the Social Media Channel is active and select Save and Close.
All settings on the Twitter and SAP C4C side are done and from this moment Tweets will be fed into your C4C system.

Social Media Messages in Cloud for Service

For incoming Tweets and Facebook messages C4C will automatically create tickets. When the Twitter/Facebook account that is related to a customer/prospect is recognized by C4C the ticket will be assigned to this account. If it is possible to retrieve other data from this customer this will be populated in the ticket as well. If the social profile is not recognized by C4C it will automatically create a new individual customer and relate the ticket to this new individual customer. In the ticket queue there is the ability to select incoming tickets on the source Social Media. 

After a ticket is created the service employees can further process the ticket and also respond via Social Media (Tweet or Private Message) or other communication channels.  A nice feature is that C4C automatically recognizes the sentiment of the Social Media Message. Of course the sentiment can be changed manually. Within the ticket all corresponding Social Media Messages related to that ticket are visible under the interaction log.

On each individual customer all Social Profiles and Social Media Messages are visible with a link to the associated ticket. The clear overview in C4C on tickets related to Social Media Messages and the easy way of responding and processing these tickets is valuable. Social Engagement shows the potential for the ticketing functionality in C4C to be fed with information and tickets from multiple channels and to engage with customers to resolve their tickets in a quick way.