In its short history, Social Media has generally resided within the marketing and PR function of a business. Initially seen as an innovative route to market and a dynamic channel for marketing to promote new products and offers.
However, as a recent study by NM Incite shows, more and more customers are turning to Social Media channels for Customer Care. Nielsen’s research highlights that nearly 60% of 18-24 year olds in the US seek customer service through social channels.
With this being the case, there is a strong argument for the contact centre to become the entry point for all social media activity. By leveraging the latest social media technology and tools, agents can then review all social interactions and manage social care directly, whilst forwarding on any relevant mentions to the marketing, sales and brand teams.
The contact centre already has numerous advantages in place to manage the social channel:
For customer service enquiries, the knowledgebase resides in the contact centre with access to relevant systems
The bulk of social interactions are often outside normal working hours, so a 24/7 contact centre operation is ideally placed
Effective response times are crucial to the social channel, with contact centre agents used to working to aggressive SLAs
Online and social channels blur geographic boundaries and often require multi-lingual skills already present in the contact centre
The social channel is prone to sudden spikes in activity and the contact centre provides the scale to manage these spikes effectively
The ideal scenario is for the contact centre to integrate social media into an effective multi-channel, multi lingual solution. Blended agents can then offer a common response and level of customer service across whatever channel the customer chooses to communicate.
Social media has become ‘just another channel’ that the contact centre needs to manage effectively.
Luke Porter, Business Development Director at Contact Centre Social.
Reproduced with kind permission of Contact Centre Social.
