Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Gets Social Engaged
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Gets Social Engaged by Blair Pleasant
The recent Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise analyst conference was filled with executive presentations, breakout sessions, lots of networking, lots of wine, and lots of good discussions. In addition to the presentations and breakout sessions, there were some great demos. My favorite was Genesys Social Engagement. Social Engagement is Genesys’ tool that began shipping in December, which:
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monitors what’s going on in the social world,
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provides analytics that define when it’s appropriate to engage with someone, and then
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helps companies to proactively engage with people on social software sites.
The solution takes a holistic approach to social, and monitors Facebook, Twitter, and other sites (via an open interface for custom integrations for social sites or monitoring services other than Facebook and Twitter) to capture interactions and apply analytics to determine sentiment and actionability, and then manages and prioritizes against customer-defined SLAs in order to route the interaction to the right resource.
In his breakout session, Eric Tamblyn noted, “For customer service and social Media groups who want to monitor popular sites, prioritize, engage and integrate social media interactions. Genesys Social Engagement automates the process while leveraging the most appropriate resources from the broader enterprise and removes operational and technological silos to enable companies to have one conversation with its customers.”
What Makes This Different
While several vendors have introduced tools for monitoring, analyzing, and in some cases, routing social media interactions, Social Engagement has a couple unique and interesting attributes. For one, it looks at the sentiment of the message (tweet, Facebook comment, etc.) – such as positive, negative, and neutral (e.g., "I’m so mad at Company X"), as well as influence score, which help determine how to route the message and what priority to give it. It also parses the messages to identify actionable words, such as “request,” “how to,” “troubleshoot,” and so on. Companies can add and customize these words for their specific vertical and company.
The algorithms used, created by Bell Labs, also analyze and determine the user’s influence level. After identifying who the user is, when possible, based on the Twitter or Facebook ID, the system checks to see if it knows who the person is, and a classification engine provides an influence score, identifying how large is the author’s social network. This score can be used as part of a formula to prioritize the action that the agent or company takes. The company using Genesys Social Engagement can decide how to use these scores and whether or not to take influence into account. There’s some interesting debate in the industry about the role of influence and whether it should play a role in the way a company responds to someone. During a discussion about this topic at the conference (while sitting at the fire pit with a glass of wine – gee I love my job!), Lisa Abbott explained, “If you have a problem, influence doesn't matter. If someone tweets about your brand, you may want to see their influence level. Support organizations have adopted social media and are figuring out how to weigh influence. It’s up to each company to set up the business rules and decide how they want to weigh influence.”
And perhaps the most important capability from an end user perspective, the system lets agents view the customer interaction history across different media. Not only can the agent see the customer’s social media history and other tweets and Facebook comments, they call also view the customer’s call history, web interactions, emails and chats to tie in the various customer interaction silos. Integrating social media with other touch points creates a holistic experience, and provides context and additional information to the agent to better serve the customer.
High Expectations
It’s too soon to say how well Genesys Social Engagement will do in the market, as the first customer, Entel (an outsourcer in Chile) is in the process of rolling it out, but I have high expectations for this offering. I hope to see a service-based offering released in the near future, which would make the solution more accessible to more companies. Because as an avid tweeter, I want companies to pay attention to and respond to my tweets when appropriate!