This document discusses how Catalyst, a housing provider in London and the Southeast, improved their social media response from being overwhelmed and unhelpful to being prompt, personal, and problem-solving. It outlines how they defined roles and processes for community and customer service teams, provided training, and set response time goals. Through cross-team collaboration and benchmarking with other organizations, Catalyst transformed their social media presence to better engage with and assist customers.

1. How to transform your social media
response from:
“Oh no! They’re talking to us! Help!”
To:
“Hi, how can we help?”
Mark Biddle
Digital and Customer Communications Manager
Catalyst

2. Our social media engagement is crucial
•Our social channels are key in terms of reflecting
how we engage with our customers
•Content is worthless if we don’t look like a
organisation who listens and responds, and
actually cares

3. About Catalyst
 Provide 21,000 homes in London and
South East
 Target of 80% of our customer contact
digital within 3 years
 Digital strategy in place to help deliver
this.

4. Our main social media channels
 Two Twitter accounts
 @Catalysthousing
 @ContactCatalyst
 Facebook: CatalystHousing

5. Review of social media channels
 Reading Room provided an assessment
of our social media channels as part of
research phase for digital strategy
 Findings showed that our customers
were trying to use these channels to
report problems or queries, but with
little success.

6. #fail
• A few years ago... Lack of clear guidelines and process

7. #fail (cont.)
•After 3 months we finally got there...

8. How we improved
•Workshops with comms/ customer services to
discuss issues and expectations
•Training session on responding to queries
•Roles and responsibilities defined:
•Comms: proactive messages
•Customer services: respond to complaints
•Monthly catch-ups between comms /customer
services to discuss issues and build team
•Visited L and Q to share experience and best
practice

9. How we improved (cont)
•Defined processes:
•Respond within 2 hours
•Use name in response to make more
personal
•Log-in message each day
•Try to deal with issues openly,
depending on data/ confidentiality
•Be friendly, helpful.

10. How to decide when to respond

11. Our progress...

12. Next steps
•Finalising social media policy
•Lifting of restrictions on social media so all
can access.
•Building awareness and engagement
across the organisation
•Support from Leadership Team to deliver
this