How to Fast-forward with Social Media in Contact Centers?

Social media explosion that happened in the last decade or so has taken everybody by surprise. Today a majority of the population is comfortably on social networking channels and talking about anything from a bad customer experience to a bad headache.

Contact centers today are increasingly coming up against some harsh realities and as such organizations need to have a renewed approach to contact center processes. Integrating social media channels into contact center processes is a great way to ensure that you listen to the customer’s voice and provide a solution that is tailor-made to their needs.

A contact center mainly consists of a call center process, along with other processes like website chat, emails, newsletters, messaging channels and so on. The contact center is part of the customer relationship management process. Today social media is completely upending the contact center process and helping to turnaround the fortunes of business enterprises by bringing in higher levels of efficiency and performance benefits.

Customers are getting increasingly demanding and every time the contact center services fails to live up to their expectations they have no qualms of getting on social media and ranting about it. Thus having an effective contact center process demands that social media channels be effectively integrated with the whole process for one seamless customer experience.

Call center is a very effective channel for most brands to service their customers. The call centers could be one of either inbound or outbound process depending on the business needs. But expectations of customers from call centers are sky-high in today’s increasingly fast-paced world. Thus it is imperative that social media insights be incorporated into the call center process in order to resolve customer complaints and drive customer advocacy alike.

Social media deployed right can be a game changer

The contact center process needs to undergo a complete revamp if organizations have to effectively compete in a world where brands are no longer constrained by geographic boundaries but only economic realities. Having a finger on the pulse of social channels can effectively help to understand customers at a granular level, anticipate customer problems, predict trends, look out for influencers, troubleshoot situations and gratify customers to ensure it ticks all the right boxes.

Having a holistic approach for contact center processes needs the support of the top management of the organization. It is high time that enterprises stop ignoring the far-reaching impact that social media has on contact center processes and the ultimate goal of ensuring customer advocacy.

It is necessary to adhere to the right strategy when integrating social media with the contact center process. There is a specific need for social media specialists and if you do not find one then you may have to train one to handle the call center process. This person will be responsible for looking at customer grievances and adroitly managing customer issues at the most opportune moment.

Having somebody who knows the ins and outs of social media is a good way to start but it is just not enough to carry the momentum forward. Therefore these personnel will have to be trained extensively. The corporate social media strategy will have to be clearly explained to them and also the best practices and policies that need to be brought onboard as part of the customer interaction process will have to be dictated. The subtle nuances of the various social media channels along with the platform-specific culture, norms and rules will have to be sufficiently imbibed too.

In order to foster a culture of social media integration it is required to have a good “social listening” strategy in place. Your target audience is talking on Facebook, Twitter, etc about all things related to their life. As a social media personnel it is your responsibility to filter out all that is not needed and only glean that data which your enterprise can convert into actionable insights.

There are oodles of social media monitoring applications that can be deployed. These tools have advanced features like looking for specific keywords, phrases and such other content for generating greater insight into what people are talking about. Such text analytics software can help to convert large amounts of unstructured data into bite-sized chunks that can easily be made sense of in order to drive better customer satisfaction levels.

Key Takeaway: Customers today have no qualms about sharing their personal information if it helps brands to provide them an improved and more personalized experience. Thus as a consequence they expect the contact center personnel to know about their expectations, needs and such other issues. Hence social media monitoring helps customer service agents to better respond to customer queries at the right time. This in turn opens the door to enhanced opportunities, better services, and helps analyse the broader trends and gather newer insights for generating leads, selling more products and services.

Contact us for a unified contact center services that puts your brand firmly on the path to progress.