By Robert A. Kobek

What is the general acceptance of social media as a customer service vehicle? How does your contact center measure up? The results of a survey this January produced interesting results that create a great benchmark for future studies. Commissioned by Connections Magazine and iTesa, the survey was a collaborative effort with CustomerCount℠ who deployed the online survey.

Titled “Social Media by Default” the intention of this information is measuring the adoption of social media in the contact center. The results give contact center professionals the opportunity to gauge how they stack up against their peers, to set a benchmark for future surveys, and to determine which type of centers (enterprise versus BPO, inbound versus outbound, among other demographic qualities) are relying on social media and to what degree.

Key Results: Forty-seven percent of the respondents identified themselves at the president or C-suite level, while 28 percent identified their classification as enterprise or BPO.

The question “Which statement most closely describes your company’s use of social media for customer interaction purposes?” demonstrates where organizations identified their various stages of using social media. The highest response, at just over one-third, was “beginner.”

Answers also indicate that individuals are more apt to rely upon social media for information than their companies would expect them to.

In addition, the following information was gleaned from our survey:

• Sixty-five percent of the respondents said social media was used for promotion and advertising, while only 19 percent indicated they use social media for customer care.
• Seventy-one percent of the respondents indicated that social media was used by individuals in a company.
• Thirty percent reported that using social media was a part of the expectation of the company. This and the prior statistic show a reliance and personal use of social media by individuals in a company as opposed to the expectation of the company. (Individuals are more apt to rely upon social media for information than their companies expect them to.)
• Eighty percent revealed the nonuse of dedicated agents to use social media for customer care. This is consistent with questions about the use of social media for customer care, where 19 percent said social media was used for customer care.
• Seventy-five percent noted the intended increase of social media in the contact center as a customer care vehicle.

The Bottom Line: While contact center professionals are aware of the need to incorporate social media in their centers, there is some reluctance to do so. Of those who are using social media, 64 percent are using Facebook, and 64 percent use social media for networking—two figures that are directly related yet have no apparent impact, positive or negative, on performance or customer loyalty.

Robert A. Kobek is president of CustomerCount.

[From Connection Magazine – April 2013]

By Donna Fluss

I recently met with a group of highly experienced contact center leaders to discuss a variety of hot topics. We engaged in a spirited discussion about how best to handle social media. This is a critical topic today, as few organizations appear to be doing this well. During our conversation, a few alarming organizational misconceptions and examples of mishandlings came up. The following are three of the most serious misconceptions and errors we uncovered:

1) Contact center agents do not have enough knowledge or skills to handle social media interactions. Given that a majority of social media interactions for businesses are service or product-related, what department would be more knowledgeable about these matters than contact centers? Not marketers, who are still claiming responsibility for the social media channel, although they generally do not have the company, product, or operational knowledge to handle a large volume of interactions within specific service levels (response times).

While not all agents in contact center or customer service have the ability to communicate effectively in writing – a skill that is necessary in order to handle social media interactions –  these departments are the only ones that have the training, knowledge, and experience to efficiently and effectively handle a large volume of diverse customer inquiries. A reasonable approach is to set up a separate team of service agents to handle social media interactions. If this is done, however, organizations face the risk of having the treatment and information provided to constituents vary based on the channel of contact. This can be a significant and costly challenge for organizations.

2) All social media interactions are required to be funneled to the department or team set up to handle social media. This means that if a friend posts something to an employee’s wall, they are expected not to respond, but instead to pass it on to the “proper” team. As social media is the newest form of conversation, this is akin to asking your employees not to talk to friends or acquaintances about your business or company.

Since employees are the best advocates for businesses, restricting their ability to discuss their company doesn’t make any sense, even if it seems practical. While a centralized servicing team, such as the contact center, should be responsible for handling or overseeing discussions that would typically fall within their purview, employees should be able to “converse” with friends and continue to advocate for their employers, just as they have in the past.

3) Companies are asking their employees to shut down their personal social media accounts. This is offensive and likely illegal (although I am not a lawyer and I’m not issuing a legal opinion on this topic). Not only should companies not have a right to ask employees to disable their personal accounts to avoid the risk of a “friend” asking about their employer, they shouldn’t want them to. Employees are the best and most effective advocates and marketers for a company’s business.

Many enterprises are intimidated by social media and have no idea how to handle these interactions. As a result, they are ignoring them and taking no action, which is the biggest mistake of all – because social media is not going away. Like it or not, social media is a new and increasingly common form of “conversation,” often taking the form of an interaction between the initiator and the public. It is being used by customers, prospects, and anyone else who feels like writing, and organizations truly do not have any control over what is written about them.

However, organizations can have 100 percent control over how they respond if they decide to take the necessary steps to build an effective social media program. As part of this initiative, employees should be given some straightforward guidelines about how the organization would like to be represented in these public forums.

Donna Fluss is president of DMG Consulting and author of The Real-Time Contact Center.

[From Connection Magazine – September 2012]

By Rebecca MacDonald

In 2011 I observed two major social media trends, and based on these, I make three predictions for the coming year.

2011 Trends

1) Big Data Cast a Big Shadow: Big data, created by the explosion in social media users, is driving the need for social analytics (including text analytics). Comments from 800 million users on Facebook cross large organizations on a daily basis, not to mention the 230 million tweets sent every day, with over 20 percent of these tweets concerning products and services.

Text analytics has been around for years, but this explosion of big data is forcing enterprise organizations to look for ways to analyze and get insights from social customer conversations. Even though 2011 saw significant inroads in the ability to mine social media, challenges remain.

2) Social Media Drove a Convergence of Customer Service with Marketing: Social media was originally driven by marketing departments, but companies found that the questions generated in social media required input from customer service. In 2011, in order to address the need for more useful and deeper insights from social conversation data, market demand evolved from social listening and monitoring to social analytics.

Organizations began moving from experimenting with social media to getting real business value from their social initiatives by tying them to business processes in marketing, sales, and customer service. For that reason, the worldwide social CRM (customer relationship management) market is estimated to reach over one billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010.

2012 Predictions

1) Real-Time Social Analytics Will Become the New Standard: In 2012, text analytics and CEM (customer experience management) tools will be sharpened to specifically target certain industries and time-sensitive events. In 2011, some industries, which included financial services, hospitality, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and IT, made inroads in this area, but there are still industries that have barely tapped into the social stream.

Across the board, the demand for real-time social analytics on timely events and topics like marketing campaigns, product launches, emerging issues, and news events (such as the ongoing election and debates) is going to become the new standard for success. Those who can analyze social customer sentiment in real-time – and share that information the fastest – will win.

2) Social Engagement Will Move from Specialized Social Teams to Business Users Throughout the Enterprise: With social media, customer issues and opportunities appear and spike very quickly. Enterprise organizations must find ways to address this by integrating social media into their customer interaction processes. The focus will be on solutions that combine social engagement with workflow and business process rules, alerting, and routing.

3) Companies Will Implement Multichannel Tools That Integrate Social Analysis with Other Enterprise Systems: There is an increasing demand among large, global organizations for text analytics solutions capable of analyzing multilingual customer conversation data from millions of sources, while integrating with other systems (such as business intelligence and CRM).

Big data is predicted by analysts to be the next “must have” competency in 2012 as the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 zettabytes (a zettabyte is one billion terabytes or 10²¹ bytes), up 48 percent from 2011. Over 90 percent of this information will be unstructured, including images, videos, MP3 files, and files based on social media and Web-enabled workloads. It will be full of rich information, but challenging to understand and analyze.

Rebecca MacDonald leads Attensity’s marketing efforts in North America, drawing on more than fifteen years of experience in marketing management with high-growth companies in the enterprise software industry.

[From Connection Magazine – Jan/Feb 2012]

By Bob Hockman

Companies can no longer be satisfied with running a monolithic contact center. Social media has insinuated itself into businesses, rapidly transforming from a form of entertainment into a required asset for customer care. The reach of social media is broad, encompassing everything from branding to awareness, from marketing to customer service. In fact, adding social media tools to the enterprise communication infrastructure engages customers and promotes both loyalty and longevity.

In order to keep up with the competition and retain customers, companies cannot ignore this new key ingredient in the conversational contact center. On the other hand, organizations that rush into a social media deployment without comprehensive planning and validation run the risk of tarnishing their reputations.

So, what do you need to know to ensure that your unified communications implementation will bring you the full benefits available? Here are the top five things to consider.

1. Customers are always “on” and want to communicate in their preferred way. There is no doubt that voice has been, and still is, king. Across the globe, most people who have to communicate with a vendor want to talk to a person. At the same time, other methods of communication, such as video, IM, and social networks, are growing in importance and usage. With all of these options available, it is important during the planning stages of a unified communications implementation that you gain a clear understanding of the ways that your company’s audience prefers to interact. Since all forms of communication are interconnected in today’s complex networks, you must ensure that one form of communication will not negatively affect another. For instance, if your audience generally sends large volumes of data via the Web, your network must be prepared to handle this without letting it affect voice communications. Customers will not be amused if there is a communication breakdown because your network has not been set up appropriately. Customers don’t care about the complexity of your network; they just care about the way it affects them on a personal level. Not only will these customers lose their confidence, you will lose their business.
2. Social media is a mode of communication in the contact center, and it’s moving faster than you think. According to a recent survey from Opus Research, 55 percent of respondents are already using social media to communicate with customers. Are you one of those who is staying ahead of the game by adapting to the requirements of your customers? If your company is part of the 45 percent still not in the game, you should know that your competitors probably are. Don’t let your company fall by the wayside because you fear investing in new technology.
3. Democracy reigns in the enterprise and contact centers. Customers want to have instant access and consistent contact with companies, employees are bringing their own tools to work, and it is IT’s role to maintain order. Different communication modes must be able to work in harmony because the bottom line is that people can no longer tolerate silos and latencies. They want instant gratification, and they want it done their way. Therefore, when you are implementing unified communications technologies in your company, you must first start with an understanding of what your customers – both internal and external – want, and then plan to logically implement those technologies.
4. Engage your audience: add a social media layer to your communication options. Don’t lose track of the fact that your investment in a unified communications platform is meant to strengthen your engagement with customers and prospects. In order to accomplish this goal, there are a few steps you must follow. First, be sure you have a clear understanding of the benefits of cloud technology so you can gain the most from it. Second, clearly outline the ways that your company will use social media. For instance, will you focus on websites, forums, Facebook, Twitter, or IM? Third, be sure to continue monitoring both your customer interactions and your networks to ensure that customers are getting the most from the engagements. Finally, in order to achieve point number three, invest in a comprehensive, detailed analytics and reporting system that will enable you to get the most out of your investment.
5. Proper planning and network validation is critical. Changing to a complex – and sometimes significantly more unwieldy – unified communication structure can be intimidating. Increased network complexity gives rise to greater possibilities for error, and as mentioned above, customers will not remain loyal if they experience communication issues.

Companies need assurance that their networks will work as planned so they are confident they can receive the full benefits of their investments. One way to mitigate risk during the transformation period is with an effective validation methodology. Thorough, end-to-end validation processes produce consistent and dependable metrics that can be used to ensure the proper integration of social media channels and confirm that any issues are handled before the system goes live. Catching errors before they affect customers helps organizations gain a competitive advantage.

When implementing a social media strategy, getting it right the first time is key to reaping the desired benefits. Testing during the pre-implementation stage will help you achieve that goal. Once the implementation has been rolled out, it is also important to keep it right with a comprehensive monitoring strategy.

If you get it right and keep it right, not only will you stay at the top of the curve, you will feel more confident in your new implementation and keep your customers coming back for more.

With more than twenty-five years of experience in the network and communications industry where he has been responsible for the creation and delivery of a number of industry-leading products, Bob Hockman serves as director of product marketing at Empirix. In this role, he directs the marketing efforts for the company’s business solutions.

[From Connection Magazine – March 2011]

By Keith Fiveson

If you are like me – and so many other people today – you’ve connected through LinkedIn, set up your profile on Facebook, Twittered your Tweets, and MySpace’d your favorite music performers to view their road schedules. But what business opportunities does social media provide, and how do you integrate them into your contact center?

Social media offers companies the opportunity to connect and communicate every day and get involved in the lives of people that use their products or services, or those that one day might. This is a body of people that want to be seen, heard, and recognized; they have needs, wants, and desires, and they are computer savvy — often with a high degree of disposable money and the time to chat, video, blog, or write articles like this one. They are willing to spend the time to speak out – or shout out – to be heard. Social media levels the playing field; while anyone can create bad press or say nasty things, in social media everyone can jump in and offset any negativity.

Social media can play a leading role as a direct channel for listening, having a conversation, and guiding the discussion – good, bad, or ugly. But having the right team, tools, and timing is essential, as you have to be involved every day to listen, be present, and “be in” the conversation. I believe that the contact center environment is an ideal place for this to happen. Agents can act as a “social media outpost,” casting their net to capture conversations they hear and then be able to deal with the hearts, minds, and problems of people that affect business products or services. Problems are inherent in any business, and it is essential to be diligent in addressing and resolving them. Using a contact center as a “social media outpost” is a good strategy to address concerns, bad press, or consumer affairs issues that can plague the best brand management strategy.

To create a social media outpost with the right people, process, and technology, it is essential to establish a set of rules to help guide this new interaction channel. Internet Protocol (IP) and Voice over IP (VoIP) have enabled multimedia channel support synergies that connect many people over the Web. Some systems are proprietary, and others are open source. Many websites have incorporated click-to-call buttons for making calls to contact centers. A visit to companies like Dell, Continental Airlines, or Sears will reveal that this technology is now mainstream. On the open source side, there are RSS feeds, tags, and rich media functionality that fuel the technology underlying the whole gamut of social media. The most fortunate aspect of setting up a social media outpost is that much of the setup is open source and free.

Facebook has over 200 million subscribers, and in 2009 it introduced its storefront to every one of the Fortune 500. To further enable the conversation, pioneering work was recently completed by the IT giant Avaya when it integrated itself with Facebook. Using the Facebook application Facephone, consumers can now interact with a contact center by starting a phone, video, or IM session.

While one part of customer service is very personal, it retains a degree of anonymity. Social media, on the other hand, is all about personality and authenticity. As a result, service is evolving along with the nature of customer service. There is no doubt that the nature of social networking will undergo even more change in the future. Communicating and connecting through a social networking site to a live customer service representative – who is only a single mouse click away – is part of that future.

Any contact center has a team of agents to handle calls. For a contact center to effectively work in tandem with social media, the first thing to be done is to maintain a dedicated team of agents and create a social media outpost. But this in itself will not produce any tangible results. You must build a framework along with a suitable strategy, one that has a set of rules and exceptions to help guide the conversation. For this to be effective, you will have to learn every aspect of the relevant social media sites and tools, and then move to the next stage: listen to the conversations, guide the responses, and lead with insightful perspectives.

Listening has always been the essence of effective communication. Just by listening, you serve half the purpose of your social media outpost strategy. However, in the realm of social media, the process of listening is done somewhat differently. Based on the various facets of your contact center, you need to sweep, scrub, and filter the information that is conveyed through your channels of communication. While monitoring such communications, you should trace who is saying what and where it is being said. By analyzing this information, you will be able to address, refine, and guide the conversation. By being present on a social media channel, you listen to your customers, and they can be satisfied from every angle.

Keith Fiveson is CEO of ITESA and is a communications consultant, enabling people to be more efficient and effective using tools, training, and processes globally. He is an advisor to call center management teams, assisting them with branding, expanding, and optimizing people in operations globally.

[From Connection Magazine – January 2010]