Many companies support social media sites to reach the millions of customers who actively network on their sites to communicate, publish comments and seek information. However, a major opportunity is often overlooked, which is to proactively use social media to reduce costs in their contact centers. Customer support centers are primarily reactive and rely heavily on expensive inbound telephone calls to support the needs of its customers. However, strategic use of social media sites can reach out to customers before they need to make a call and deliver value-added support for their customers.
It is important for customer support managers to understand fully the reason customers contact them and identify transactions that they can eliminate by proactively engaging with customers over social media sites before they make a call. For example, medical insurers may require documentation to be sent to them prior to paying a claim. It is fairly common for a claimant to place a call after sending the required documents to confirm if the correspondence was received. With the cost of each telephone call around seven dollars, insurers can reduce this type of call by sending a message to customers’ social channels of choice (Facebook, Twitter, Text) to notify receipt of the document. End result is call avoidance and a good customer experience.
There are several other common causes for check-in calls by customers, many of which can be reduced with proactive outreach. Alerts are another example for outbound customer reach. A retailer can send out special value offers to notify customers on products of specific interest or announce special events based on the customer’s preferences. It is important to keep updated customer data and preferences to identify which social channel to send outbound messages. Engaging customers over the social network allows customer support organizations to differentiate their services by engaging customers where they are rather than force them to use traditional channels.
Rather than take a wait and see attitude, the time is now for moving forward with your customers’ social media outreach program. Begin by keeping the following steps in mind.
• Create cross functional teams. Work with marketing and sales to align with current campaigns and to discuss areas that are best suited for social network outreach.
• Understand timing of outreach. Reaching out to customers at a time when they are already shopping for a product or service increases sales revenues and builds stronger customer relationships.
• Work within existing framework. The contact center is the natural place to support social media outreach. It already has access to customer databases and CRM applications and is set up to manage the social media queue by mirroring processes developed for dealing with the telephone queue.
• Actively monitor websites. The social response team needs access to brand monitoring tools that report on external comments and sends real time alerts on customer activities.
• Hire social media experts. Consider hiring experts who are adept at social medial and can quickly send Tweet messages within the 140 character limit and know how to post a message on Facebook.
• Don’t isolate social media team. Avoid isolating social media outreach from core customer activities. Social customers are the same customer previously waiting on hold to talk to an agent.
