Customer support rules are rapidly changing, as unprecedented numbers of customers use social media channels to express options, seek assistance and purchase products. Customers have quickly adopted Facebook, Twitter and Google, as their primary means for gathering information regarding a company’s products and services. In many cases social media customers receive support from multiple departments within a company but are isolated from the contact center. This is because the traditional contact center is generally not ready for reaching out to the social customer or will only provide secondary support when its telephone agents are free. Regardless of how companies choose to market and support their social media customers, they should apply the same basic procedures found in contact centers to positively engage their customers.
Contact centers operations basically engage in the similar processes to ensure their customers receive the support needed. These tasks can be readily applied to customers who choose social media sites as their first choice to contact a company. Examples of these processes include:
• Identify the customer and request. With telephone interactions this may be done via an IVR that asks customers to identify themselves and reason for the call. On social channels, it requires a company to proactive monitor Facebook, Twitter and other sites and to sort and classify comments and queue for a response.
• Prioritize customers. Phone channels often use customer data bases to prioritize important customers and route requests to the appropriate party for handling. Social media requires access to the same customer profiles to classify and prioritize customer requests and ensure these requests are directed to the suitable resource for response.
• Solve issue. Traditional phone channels support their agents with knowledge bases and product information to quickly respond to the caller within a single session. Resources engaged to answer customer requests from a social site need the same access to product and customer information to deliver the same information as telephone agents.
• Provide adequate staffing. Phone and email channels typically use scheduling tools to ensure that the right amount of agents are available during busy times. Social channels must also respond back quickly to posted comments and not be delayed due to inadequate number of resources. Information posted on these sites goes viral quickly and require companies respond quickly to all relevant postings.
• Monitor and measure. Contact centers have numerous reporting tools that monitor and measure how well agents handle contacts and engage with customers. These tools form the foundation for efficient operations. Social media channels require the same attention to measurements. This includes metrics on the number of conversations on social media sites, transaction recordings, average handle times and accuracy.
Bottom line is that companies cannot afford to support social media customers with any less care than they do with traditional channel customers. Importantly, most companies already have the structural support tools in place and need to extend their core functions with some modifications to social sites. Although there are a few good examples of companies who understand this and are successfully supporting their social media customers, there are even more examples of major corporations who saw their brand badly tarnished by not paying attention to what was occurring over social media sites.
