How To Go Social With Your Contact Center
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How To Go Social With Your Contact Center by Jason Andersson
Your company meets the criteria for adding social media to your customer service operations as outlined by Blair Pleasant in her article “Back to Basics Before Going Social.” You have analyzed how your current customer base communicates with you using the telephone, email, chat, SMS, video and so on and now understand that you can leverage these channels by integrating social media as an additional channel. In addition you have measured and evaluated your KPI’s and investigated how well you treat your current customer inflow and decided that there is room to handle an additional channel to reach out to your customers and provide them better service.
As Nancy Jamison presented in her article “Social media in the contact center: Hype or Strategy?” your company does have customers who regularly want to interact using social elements and your brand carries enough weight to enter into the social space successfully. Maybe your company is doing business in a vertical that truly can benefit from the immediate form of information dissemination that social media sites can offer.
So how do you do it? What steps do you need to take to successfully implement a customer-winning social media customer service entry? Lets discuss some important points that can help you forward.
Identify where your customers are
There are a number of social media sites out there; most notable are Facebook and Twitter. But you have other sites such as LinkedIn, Youtube, and many regional and local versions throughout the world as well. Facebook exceeded 750 million users, with 30% of these from the United States. 250 million users access Facebook using a mobile device, making social media almost always present. Twitter has surpassed 100 million users that send and receive 140 character messages. Users include reporters from the major news outlets as well as world leaders and consumers at large.
Where are your customers in the social world? What type of social users are you planning to interact with? If you don’t know, just ask them. If they want you to support them through social media, they’ll tell you where and how to be there for them.
In the New York Times Bestseller Rework, the authors present a compelling idea of using new media to communicate with your customers. “Today’s smartest companies know better. Instead of going out to reach people, you want people to come to you. An audience returns often – on its own – to see what you have to say.” (Fried & Heinemeier Hansson, 2010) Social media can be that channel that will enable you to provide better support to your customers, if you know where the customers are.
Decide internal ownership
At first you might think that the contact center is the best place for handling policies and rules for how the organization should communicate with customers on social sites. But remember that this is not your traditional voice call or chat session, these messages are persistent and can spread virally throughout your customer base before you have time to correct or adjust.
Here’s an example of a company that did this right. A European company in the financial sector decided to enter the social media field very carefully using one specific social site. They saw this as a marketing effort combined with customer service and carefully crafted a policy for what messages could and should be answered using this media. The policy described how to respond to comments and posts, and also in what persona. Even if staff answering messages had their own accounts, none of them were used. All answers to support questions in this forum were answered with the official company profile to ensure credibility.
In addition to writing a policy, they informed the department heads and line managers about their intentions and how to handle any interactions between customers and employees who also used the same social site. The concept and policy was then distributed via internal communication channels and shared, discussed and followed up. Any employee who received messages, comments or questions about their services, the workplace or such, should redirect these to the official persona and not engage in a direct dialog, even if they were “friends”.
Today the group has organizationally moved into the customer service group, but the policy is still under marketing ownership because social site communication is global, has a permanent impact and is very viral.
Implement a solution
Policy handling should be a marketing department issue, but the technology used to service social media contacts should be common with the customer service solution at large.
Invest in the technology used to handle your customer contacts. There are technologies that have been used in contact centers for years that handle all types of media: phone calls, emails, chat sessions, mobile text messages and more. This technology is based on proven algorithms that can find the most appropriate agent to handle the customer case, integrates with business applications and CRM systems, and provides the customer with information and the supervisors with statistics and real-time information.
Social media integrations should use the same technology. Make sure your investment is in a system that treat all media equally, but lets you set priorities individually per channel, per agent and per customer service center. The system should allow for skills-based routing, full cradle-to-grave reporting and contact details, as well as recording of the conversation, regardless how the conversation took place.
By using the same underlying technology, your company can utilize a social media workforce that works solely with the social media channel or is integrated with the customer service group to support various media types.
Agent training
Answering a customer Tweet using only 140 characters can be a challenge for any user. Your contact center agents must be trained to be able to carry out these truncated conversations, which are very different from lengthy chat sessions or emails. In the case of Twitter, short is not sweet, it is mandatory. Your agents must be trained in knowing when to escalate a conversation on a social media site onto a more expressive (and possibly less persistent) mode of communication, such as a chat session or phone call. The system used must allow them to do this as well.
It is important that this training is performed before allowing an agent to “go social,” due to the inherent risks of mistakes taking on a life of their own. The training should include guidelines, such as mentioned above, and a policy on what to answer, how to engage and when not to. It should also cover when and how to escalate conversations to other media or other people in the customer service organization. A language code should always be part of the training. Internet communication can take on a very intimate personality, which can be fine in some situations, but for the most part it is not okay for a company representative to communicate outside of a company “persona”. The code should include how to use symbols (such as smileys), idioms (such as blog or URL/site) and popular shortenings (such as LOL – laugh out loud, B4 – before, or BRB – be right back).
Introducing agents to social media
There are two ways you can introduce agents into social media interactions: under supervisor control or using technology solutions that provide fixed answers.
Supervisor controlled introduction
Some organizations prefer a model where new agent messages must be reviewed during the first week or so of operations. Before any messages go out to the customer social site, a supervisor must approve them.
After this first probationary period, responses are sent out directly, but are carefully monitored by a team leader or supervisor so that any problems are quickly dealt with. This period lasts until the agent is proficient and has shown a good sense of understanding of the policies for answering customers on social sites and is set free without any more direct supervision.
Using canned messages
Instead of allowing agents to write responses themselves, a database of prepared (canned) messages can be used. Any question, comment or statement is analyzed by the system and if possible a suggestion is given to the agent. The agent selects the response from the suggestion and sends it to the customer. Any messages falling outside the scope of the canned messages are sent to agents trained in manual handling, and the database is updated if necessary. This way any agent can answer social media communications without the risk of making mistakes.
How to measure social media communications
Any contact center operation you will look at will rely on having a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure against. They will include basic KPIs such as number of calls, wait time (average, maximum, minimum), number of contacts handled by each agent, talk time and so on. These will be important for social media responses, but it’s even more important to find ways to measure the quality of the messages.
The consequences for a low-quality message, even if it is in shorthand using less than 140 characters, can be devastating. Thus many times the initial focus of KPI’s is the perceived quality of the message.
Measuring quality is tricky. You can use subjective methods and measure the number of positive mentions and replies, as well as if an answer is spread virally. For a more objective measurement, ask customers to fill out a survey using an attached shortened URL to every message.
Service experience often happens without the customer noticing it. But the customer needs evidence that service has occurred. Just think of the folded toilet paper in the hotel, it shows that the room has been cleaned. How do you prove to your customer that you have provided them service? You could explain how much time they saved by using your service, or maybe tell them how many people were involved in solving their issue.
Turn your customers to your greatest asset
Do not enter social media with the sole purpose of putting out a fire that has started. Think more strategically and take extra steps to outthink your competitors and give your customers a better customer service experience.
Any successful social media strategy should aim at making your customers interested in listening to you. “All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. The most fortunate companies have audiences.” (Fried & Heinemeier Hansson, 2010) An audience, in contrast to customers and fans, wants to know more about your company, they want more information and they like to hear from you. Build an audience by being creative in social media sites, blogs and videos, provide better customers service options and let your customers learn from you.
Teach your audience what they don’t know. Don’t be afraid that the competition will steal from you. Consider master chefs who write cookbooks. They are not concerned with competition using their recipes because they know you need more than the list of ingredients - you need talent, and that is what your organization consists of. Use new ways to reach out to your customer. Try posting self-help videos on Youtube. Teach your customers how to benefit from your products and how to better use them, and allow the audience to listen to other customers’ success stories. Leverage these brand advocates as part of your strategy to win new customers to enlarge your fan base and increase your worldwide audience.
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