How 3M pioneers exceptional customer experiences
by Kirsten Salmanowicz, Senior Manager, Global Media Tech & Governance, 3M
Managing media and technology is never easy, given the pace of change. At 3M, it's a huge effort, and we rely on our media team to unify our message and our mission.
I’m the senior manager of media technology and governance at 3M, and my team is part of our public affairs department. I head the team responsible for leading 3M's global integrated media strategies and capabilities, advancing and protecting 3M’s brand reputation and scaling marketing and communication strategies. I also handle enterprise social and paid media tech stack across 3M's three business groups.
Everyone interacts with 3M, even if they don’t know it. 3M has more than 60,000 products on the market, along with 46 technology platforms and a team of scientists and researchers who develop products. With corporate operations in 70 countries and sales in 200, 3M is committed to creating the technology and products that advance every company, enhance every home and improve every life.
An inconsistent approach to communication and social media moderation
The spirit of innovation and collaboration forms the foundation of 3M, and that sentiment extends to our customer relationships. But our team wasn't always staffed properly, and we often adopted an inconsistent approach to social media moderation among our full-time employees, contract workers and agencies. We lacked the ability to support our regional teams and couldn’t scale our moderation model across dozens of countries and numerous languages. And because we couldn’t scale, we weren’t always reaching as many customers as possible.
These limitations prevented us from getting to know more customers. We know they want quick responses, yet we also wanted to prioritize representing the 3M brand in a positive manner. We asked, “How can we do this better?”
We conducted extensive analysis to determine the best path forward. We considered several approaches to overhauling our customer care teams, including hiring additional employees and contract workers and outsourcing our global service centers. We also weighed working with a global agency and building an internal global service center. The former was too expensive, and the latter was difficult to scale due to the regions in which 3M operates.
We started exploring best practices and how other, similarly-sized companies moderate their social channels. We discovered that many iconic brands, including Honda, McDonald’s and Prada, use Sprinklr Social to connect with customers and manage their social media at scale. We liked Sprinklr for several reasons:
- It was more cost-effective than internally staffing a global service center because it offered broad language coverage and a robust international presence without building a solution from the ground up.
- It has a wide portfolio of services to support a company of our size.
- It was less costly than hiring a global agency to help moderate 3M's social channels.
- It required less onboarding time than other options.
We had a great opportunity to improve 3M's social moderation capabilities and create a consistent model across channels and territories. We adopted Sprinklr to do it.
Rethinking moderation with a global, unified platform
As part of our onboarding process to the Sprinklr moderation teams, we centralized FAQs and focused on building robust contact escalation documentation, conducting brand training and enabling approval workflows to ensure appropriate tone and content. We also had bi-weekly training and support meetings with the Sprinklr team. To help protect the 3M brand, we developed a tailored crisis management strategy that involves automatic escalations for specific keywords and scenario planning to prepare the Sprinklr moderation team for sensitive situations.
Our initial Sprinklr use case was organic social moderation. We have since added Ad Comment Moderation across 3M's accounts to leverage lead generation opportunities from people connecting with 3M on social media. Now, we have a consistent approach to both organic and paid moderation to ensure we process every case and track it back to the appropriate advertising campaign. By doing so, Sprinklr allows us to monitor business goals and drive real-time optimizations.
Over several years, we’ve added additional capabilities such as Sprinklr Content Marketing, Journey Facilitator and advanced reporting across all modules. We’ve optimized our tech stack, too, integrating Sprinklr with key MarTech to drive greater integrations to reduce tool fatigue and simplify the integration of data sources.
Since we have a more consistent and integrated approach to organic and paid social moderation, we have much more robust reporting and the ability to identify insights in real time. The Sprinklr moderation team can identify key themes, find new opportunities for community building outreach and discover high-quality user-generated content. We are leveraging some of this user-generated content instead of paying for content creation or stock photography, which helps us build community and increase engagement rates.
Investing in AI at 3M
We can’t talk about social without talking about AI. The entire 3M team is working to figure out the safest and most scalable ways to leverage this technology, and one area where we’re investing energy is through AI translations.
It’s exciting: the quality of Sprinklr translations is very high, so we are no longer always dependent on external translation agencies that take two to three weeks to deliver content in another language. Instead, we have results within minutes via Sprinklr and can receive approvals from team members within a few days. AI translation is a huge cost saver and helps us get to market faster. That said, we have to make sure we’re compliant with all of our AI privacy and legal requirements, so we have human team members review everything before it goes into the world.
In addition to that use case, we also use AI for insights. Because we have connected all our 500+ social media accounts and thousands of ad accounts, we have massive amounts of data—and few analysts. We began leveraging Sprinklr Insights to synthesize that information and surface what’s working well and where we can improve.
We are also leveraging AI to:
- Understand trends and track engaging content
- Enable automation like the Sprinklr Rule Engine to prioritize community management escalation
- Enhance our recently launched chatbot to offer immediate, real-time support
There’s no shortage of AI use cases, and Sprinklr has many options to help 3M explore all possibilities.
Improved SLAs and customer satisfaction
Working with Sprinklr, our average community management SLA is now less than 11 hours, which is a significant improvement compared to prior years, and we continue to work hard to drive even more improvements in this area.
That number is even lower when customers engage with Sprinklr chatbot software, which we’ve configured to provide immediate support on our most common inquiries in five priority languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Thai. When customers leverage the chatbot, our average SLA is 65 minutes, a 90% reduction compared to our pre-Sprinklr number.
Another way we measure success is adoption. We continue promoting Sprinklr as a way to drive positive business outcomes, reduce costs and create efficiencies. We are driving full Sprinklr adoption across our 500 users and scaling new global capabilities to enable business growth.
Putting the focus on our customers
A social media team’s work is never done. Their days often involve tracking activity, engaging with users and compiling reports from various channels. So, as a leader, it’s exciting to see a team transcend their day-to-day tasks and step into more strategic efforts that grow their talent. My team now spends more time on tasks that drive our business priorities, such as content creation, social strategy and actioning reporting insights.
Working with Sprinklr’s moderation team has transformed how 3M approaches customer interactions on social media. We can now support 21 languages across our four business groups, delivering accurate, on-brand information independently (although 3M subject matter experts are there when needed). The Sprinklr team also shares actionable themes we can take to our leadership team.
Sprinklr has given us additional capacity and driven results we couldn’t have achieved internally. We connect more with our customers and learn from them daily, and that makes 3M a better company.