Putting Social Media Engagement at the Heart of Customer Service with Cloud Contact Centre Solutions

Gartner has identified five of the most popular use cases of social media for customer service in the report featured in this newsletter . In this article we will drill deeper into using social media engagement for customer service. We will also take a look at the employee roles, processes and technology required to support this activity.

Customers enjoy the immediacy of using social media such as Twitter or Facebook to share and gather information. They also like the freedom social media allows to glean information prior to purchasing without having to contact the manufacturer, retailer or support organisation first. When they do not find the information they need online and have cause to contact an organisation they want quick, concise and straightforward answers to their questions. Likewise, if customers do not get the response they expect via the customer service or complaints process, social media is often the channel of choice to air a grievance and can do significant damage if not, identified, responded to and defused quickly.

Unanswered complaints and enquiries posted by customers on an organisation's social media sites can damage a company's reputation and alienate its public. Many businesses are already using social media to promote their products and to follow what customers are saying about their services. But how many are using social media effectively for customer service? According to Gartner1, "By 2015, businesses that lack an all-channel customer engagement strategy will lose 15% to 20% of their best customers to competitors that have such a strategy."

It has never been more imperative to have a social media engagement strategy and to get it right with the most relevant people, processes and technology in place.

Call centres have been handling customer enquiries for the last 20-30 years and for the majority of that time Intelecom has been providing the technology to allow organisations to quickly and cost effectively answer customer demand and resolve queries. One of the key findings from the Gartner report is

• Social customer service success is dependent on people across customer service, e-commerce, marketing and sales working together and establishing processes for supporting a unified brand image on social media.

This highlights the importance of integration when it comes to social media engagement for customer service. The secret to departments working together and a unified brand image is system integration. Intelecom Connect is a complete, all-in-one, contact centre solution in the cloud which easily integrates to other applications and environments. Through integration with other systems Connect provides the central platform to streamline processes and respond to customer enquiries whatever the channel. Flexibility inherently runs through Connect and as such it can feed statistics and links into many leading customer relationship management (CRM) and collaboration tools such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Transversal, VerintWFM and other third party applications. This functionality enables information to be exchanged and collaborative working between departments.

At the heart of customer service is fast response and first time resolution. So having the right customer service agent in the right place at the right time is essential. One of the recommendations in the Gartner report is

• Invest in social customer service technologies to help agents queue up social inquiries, to help customer service managers identify areas of success and those in need of improvement

This stresses the importance of empowering agents to queue social enquiries. Implementing Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) technology, such as Intelecom Connect, allows organisations to utilize skill-based routing in queues regardless of which channel a customer is using. It can be telephone, email, Facebook, Twitter or numerous alternatives. Each communication channel is managed by the same intelligent routing algorithm ensuring every request whatever the media-type is answered by the highest skilled, first available agent. To the cloud the channel is irrelevant with queries coming into one place, which in Connect is a specifically designed interface advising the agent of the source of the enquiry.

Each social media enquiry is quickly identified and categorised by type and grouped together. Specially trained agents can then select the relevant enquiries to respond to. Statistical information held in Connect reports on how long it takes to answer each request and the average waiting time per request. This valuable information helps managers identify areas of success and those where additional training maybe required.

In addition supervisors can define key performance indicators (KPI) alarms for social media queues. Management can be notified when these indicators have been breached allowing immediate action to be taken to maintain service levels.

Individuals with high numbers of followers, especially celebrities, are regarded as key influences and it is important to keep them happy as they can quickly drive action in a positive and negative way. For many years Intelecom Connect has been able to prioritize VIP callers using voice technology and telephone numbers linked to databases or CRM solutions. In the same way social media names can be identified via an organisation's CRM system and dealt with by way of pre-defined process.

Likewise social conversations and customer histories should both integrate with and supplement existing records to give a 360-degree view of the customer. With modern CCaaS technology social media interactions are stored in a media archive. Using Connect Media Archive, organisations can retrieve, listen to, save and share enquiries and using policy driven rules promote consistency and best-practice.

We have identified the importance of having the right people in the right place to handle customer service enquiries regardless of the channel used. Aggregating, queuing and service level processes need to be adopted to ensure standards are maintained across multichannel communication. Finally, the Gartner report looked at the technology required for social media engagement for customer service. In this instance technology should be a unifying enabler to allow organisations to move towards providing a true customer engagement centre regardless of the communication channel customers chose to use.

With Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) technology, such as Connect, organisations are able to:

• Aggregate social media posts using advance functionality for queuing, routing and service levels regardless of communication channel
• Assign posts and create filtered queues to allow specially trained agents to speed up handling times and avoid negative social media noise caused by slow response times
• Prioritize key influencers and important customers
• Integrate with database, CRM and media archive solutions to store customer and conversation details
• Provide multi-skilled agents with a total view of a customer's interaction with the organisation regardless of channel, thereby providing the ability to identify individual customer needs and business development opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell.

With so many different channels and methods of communication coming into the contact centre it is essential to keep control of staffing levels and management reporting. Only a complete CCaaS solution such as Intelecom Connect provides the same standard of reporting across all channels. It is too easy to start comparing apples with pears where multiple systems are used to queue and respond to enquiries. A far better understanding of activity and response times can be gained from a single multichannel contact centre solution. By deploying the same metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and alarms within one application consistent granular reporting can be achieved.

However, amalgamating queues only works if there are agents available to answer enquiries whatever their source. Intelecom delivers workforce management by integrating Connect with Verint Workforce Optimisation Software. Using this powerful cloud-based solution, managers can forecast and schedule agents to respond to customer demand from all channels.

For organisations moving towards a customer engagement strategy there are three important points to remember:

• Blend all enquiries into one or several queues using the same platform and application to view their progress
• Recognise and track key influencers as soon as they call or post an enquiry and respond quickly
• Implement a multichannel workforce management solution and consistent reporting

And there is no time to lose!

¹Gartner – What You Need to Know About Social Media for Customer Service, September 2013