Delivering Social Customer Service – Focus on the Basics
Delivering Social Customer Service – Focus on the Basics by Blair Pleasant
On Tuesday, August 13, I participated in a webinar hosted by Interactive Intelligence, titled “Delivering Social Customer Service – More than Just Having a Presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Along with my co-presenters, Tim Passios, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at Interactive Intelligence, and Michael DeSalles, Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, we discussed general trends in the contact center, the technologies available, and best practices for social customer service. The premise of the discussion was that even though the use of social media for customer care is getting lots of hype, it’s important to step back and understand the basics and best practices of customer care before jumping in and offering yet another customer service channel.
As a company with a great deal of experience in the contact center space, Interactive Intelligence found that while there is value in social media and social customer service, there’s more to it than just supporting customers on Twitter and Facebook – there needs to be a philosophy around deeper relationships with customers. Before adding a social customer care channel, companies first need to focus on the basics. Customers are likely to go to Twitter and Facebook to complain about a business if they have a bad experience with them, so it’s important to try to meet your customers’ needs and solve their problems to avoid having them turn to social media to complain and vent.
During the webinar, Michael DeSalles discussed contact center priorities and trends, the challenges associated with trying to improve customer satisfaction while reducing contact center costs, and how customer satisfaction gets "squeezed" between cost and quality. Tim Passios discussed the key technologies available to contact centers today for servicing customers and managing and monitoring agents to ensure service quality.
I presented information on customer service best practices, based on research conducted with several exemplary Interactive Intelligence customers. The key take-away from my presentation was that customer satisfaction is what really matters, and everything from agent hiring, training, and compensation should be based on that.
Here’s a brief overview of some of my key points regarding customer service best practices.
Focus on People, Process, Technology, and Corporate Culture
When looking at best practices, the key areas of focus should be: people, process, technology. When it comes to customer care, culture is important as well. A focus on customer care and customer relationships has to be prevalent throughout the organization, and needs to be part of the corporate culture – from the CEO on down. I recommend having a customer experience officer who’s responsible for customer care. This C-level person should help determine the overall customer experience strategy, and work with other key people in the organization to make sure that everyone is working toward the same goals.
In terms of people, contact centers need to spend the time and energy to hire the right people, and train them properly in terms of not just the company’s products, but in basic customer service. In addition, it’s important to provide them with the appropriate incentives, and empower agents to solve the customers’ issues. Some agent “do’s and don’ts” include:
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Do: focus on the customer, show respect, listen carefully, and communicate clearly.
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Don’t: sound canned or fake, blame the customer, and let the call escalate to management.
On the technology side, let customers use self service (IVR) when possible, as well as their choice of channel (voice, email, web, mobile, etc.). Use skills-based routing to route interactions to the appropriate agent, and screen pop to provide information to the agent about the customer.
When looking at processes, it’s important to concentrate on the customer experience rather than metrics, and to make the experience easy for customers and agents. Fix existing channels, such as voice, web, email, before adding a new channel like social.
I recommend that rather than relying on traditional metrics like average handle time, number of calls answered, etc., the only KPI that should matter is customer satisfaction.
There was a lot of information presented during this webinar, and I’ll write subsequent articles in the coming weeks about other areas that were covered.