Guest Blogger Mariann McDonagh: Using Social Media to (Finally!) Link Contact Centers and Business Departments
For years contact centers have operated as islands within the enterprise. Customer complaints about everything from broken products to dirty restrooms have typically been trapped in the call center like the marooned characters on Lost. Valuable information that could be used to improve products and services, drive marketing, and shape new programs has rarely been shared outside the four walls of the call center facility.
The explosion of social media presents an opportunity to tear down those walls for the sake of improving the business. From Twitter to Facebook and beyond, contact centers can harvest a mother lode of customer input that sales, marketing, product development, and other departments can leverage to pinpoint deficiencies, identify customer needs, generate buzz, and more.
The challenge, then is to set up a system to efficiently monitor incoming messages, route them appropriately, respond as needed, and otherwise ensure that a Twitter rave or a Facebook rant will not simply go into a black hole where its value as a barometer of customer opinion will be lost forever.
One approach is to build a cross-functional team with representatives from any impacted departments. That way, you can be sure that all relevant parties will have a voice in the social media conversation and pave the way for each department to respond appropriately to topics that fall into their area of responsibility. Then you can:
• Establish the contact center as the gatekeeper that monitors what is being said about your products, your company, and your industry. The contact center is the logical choice because agents are department-agnostic. Equip them with tools that aggregate and organize social media posts by any category to simplify the monitoring process.
• Train specific social media agents with strong brand knowledge and good communication skills to reply to the majority of the posts, decide which messages need departmental responses, and forward urgent messages to the appropriate parties. These agents must be highly skilled because their responses will be read by the digital masses -- not simply heard by individual customers.
• Look for trends and share them with your cross-functional team, ideally in regular meetings. This is where you can really bridge the gap between the contact center and the rest of the business.
• Create answers to commonly asked questions, based on input from your cross-functional team, and build the answers into your knowledgebase. This is essential, because your responses should be consistent from day to day and agent to agent. The voices can vary -- Activision agents have unique identities on Twitter, for example, and Zappos agents announce when they're coming on and going off shift to show that different people are posting -- but the core messages and policies should not.
To date, all of this is uncharted territory. There are as yet no best practices, and there will inevitably be much trial and error in trying to optimize the processes involved in sharing social media insights across the enterprise.
But one thing is clear: Social media has the potential to play an important role in helping businesses understand the likes, dislikes, needs, and interests of those who buy their products and services. It's an entirely new way to tune into the voice of the customer -- and customers absolutely love it and embrace brands that are using it. Those who ignore it do so at their own peril.
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About the Author: Mariann McDonagh is Chief Marketing Officer for inContact
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