Today customers want answers in their preferred channel. That means Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, forums and more.
With social media the call center has a big opportunity to prove its value. As the web becomes an increasingly important customer channel call center… acronyms AHT (average handle time), ACD (automatic call distributor), FCR (first call resolution), IVR (interactive voice response) will take on lesser importance.
Social media in the call center is a question top for senior level individuals who are tasked with incorporating social media into their customer service strategy. Whether you are a COO, Customer Service Director, VP of customer care or CEO of a small business, getting an education around best practices for social media in the call center would be of great benefit.
While some of you are already deep in a social customer engagement strategy initiative, and your call centers and customer service departments integrate social media, many of you aren’t there yet. There are some small ways you can understand the landscape of social media in the call center.
You can’t introduce the concept of a social customer service offering without introducing the concept of Social CRM. According to Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light:
“The transformation that’s sparked the need for Social CRM seems to have occurred in 2004. It has been a social revolution in how we communicate, not a revolution in how we do business per se. All institutions that humans interact with have been affected by things like the cellphone/smartphone, the new social web tools and the instant availability of information in an aggregated and organized way that provides intelligence to the person on the street, not just the enterprise.”
Social CRM according to Greenberg has changed the landscape of how we communicate with our customers. Every call center should be looking at ways to tweak its process to better accommodate increasingly social customers who are using emerging social channels, in addition to their smartphones. Let’s look at a case study of a company that started using social media during a crisis.
JetBlue’s Call Center Turns to Social Media in Emergency Situation
Social CRM can help cut the costs of your call center. One example of a company that leverages social media to cut costs is JetBlue Airlines.
The airline industry often faces emotional and irate customers. There is nothing more personal to a human being than their relationships, safety and time. Flights can induce customer rage, delight and every emotion in between.
February 14, 2007 was Valentines Day. This was the day the JetBlue passengers were trapped on the tarmac for eleven hours at JFK Airport. The customers were livid. There was no power, food or water. Two passengers were even diabetic.
The JetBlue team set out to reach customers online providing oversight and guidance for the people managing the 24-7 Twitter account. There were a total of 17 reps manning the Twitter account, and 17 people throughout the organization who were subject matter experts available for the reps at any time.
In addition to the social customer service team who took pressure off the call center by responding via twitter, the company featured its CEO on the JetBlue YouTube channel to address its customers and the press. The social customer outreach helped to allay this PR nightmare for JetBlue and its customer service and marketing teams.
Ultimately JetBlue didn’t take a terrible hit because of their agile disaster response using social channels.
While many of the call centers out there aren’t faced with the same tasks as we saw above with JetBlue, there are still some small steps your call center can take to improve your social customer strategy. Step one is coming to terms with losing total control of the conversation.
How do we control what people are saying about our products and their customer service interactions?
To become a more socially evolved customer service department you must realize you can’t control all the messaging. With the proliferation of social media it’s impossible to manage customer dialogue. You simply must get involved in the conversation in an intelligent, thoughtful and consistent manner. One way to do this is to train call center representatives to interact with customers on social media, and create a clear set of guidelines around social media.
Additionally you can also take the burden off of the call center by empowering customers with information on social channels. For many call centers making the most out of social media means publishing extensive DIY content, focusing on customer education and making the customer education sharable. YouTube and blogs can be a great way to directly communicate with customers helping them make the most out of your products and services without having to contact the call center.
If someone were to say something to you in “real life,” and you were to not respond, that would generally be considered rude.
Small things like saying “thank you” can make a huge impact on the way customers feel about your brand. A small act goes a long way because most customer service departments aren’t listening on social channels. If you are indeed listening you gain a competitive advantage by differentiating your call center.
With that said, it reflects very well on the company if the call center or customer service department joins the conversation in a polite, civil and understanding way.
How can I get the data that proves or refutes social media in the call center is the right thing to do?
Today executives are focusing on Return on Engagement (ROE) as opposed to Return on Investment (ROI) because it takes a good amount of time to see patterns with social media and how it increases or decreases the cost of customer engagement. If social media is done right, social media should be decreasing the call center’s costs.
You become what you measure. That being said every call center director must carefully choose the best success metrics (KPIs). The KPIs you select are the most important metrics for your organization. Social media can be difficult to measure because there are many factors that will offset your metrics. In addition, you are undergoing a multi-channel customer strategy campaign. The call center metrics you choose for your social media efforts should be driven by the goals you establish.
In the next few months on this blog we will provide a series of blogs looking at the most popular social media metrics in the contact center. Stay tuned for these thought-provoking business blogs around metrics and the social customer.
Conclusions About Social Media in the Call Center
While some of us are excited about social media, others of us are a little afraid of it. There’s still a lot of uncertainty around social tools. But we have enough data at this point to offer some strong conclusions.
Don’t forget all eyes are now on the call center.
It’s only a matter of time before before call center directors figure out the right way to convince leadership to invest in non-traditional touch-points. Non-traditional customer touch-points will soon become traditional. Comment below on your own experience implementing a social customer strategy, or any questions you might have facing your call center.