Social media: Social media, mass collaboration, people networks have enabled users to interact with each other, and enabling enterprises and organizations to analyze the user behavior and align their strategies accordingly
2 Improving customer experience
In order to sustain business, and preserve their customer base, businesses are moving towards improving the customer experience, to attract new customers and also to retain their existing customers’ base. Customer experience improvement helps enterprises to maintain customer loyalty, improve customer satisfaction, increase the market share, increase employee morale and enhance efficiency.Cross channel enablement is key to improving customer experience, where enterprises deploy contact center services to assist customer through any channel and ensure seamless interaction – continuity of interaction across all channels like voice, video, SMS, MMS, WAP, Email, Fax, Letter, and SNS (Social Network Service).
Figure 2: 
Enterprises are also concentrating on mobile e-commerce to address the growing population of customers using smart phones and tablets for web browsing and context-aware applications. Web based contact channels like SNS play a major role in assisting enterprises to reach vast customer base and also audience base, to advertise their products and strategies and attracting new revenue streams.
3 Social Media and Contact Center
The interest and hype of Social media has gained momentum in the last few years due to the power it vests on the users. Social media provides a new approach for people to communicate with each other and no one is in charge and no one owns the conversation. Once a thought has gone "social" it cannot be retracted. Social Media have been around in one form or another since the internet emerged, but many public and private organizations are just beginning to appreciate their impact and potential. From a customer service perspective, social media have the ability to alter a company's reputation, brand and bottom line.
Social media can play a leading role as a direct channel to listen in, have a conversation and guide the discussion, good, bad or ugly. But having the right team, tools and timing is essential, as you have to be involved every day to listen, be present and “be in” the conversation. I believe that the contact center environment is an ideal place for this to happen. Agents can outreach and act as a “social media outpost” casting their net to capture conversations, hear, and deal with hearts, minds, and problems and people that impact your business products or services. Problems are inherent in any business and it is essential that you are diligent in addressing and resolving them. Using a contact center as a “Social Media Outpost” is a good strategy to address concerns, bad press or consumer affairs issues that can plague the best brand management strategy.
3.1 Impact of Social media on Inbound Contact Center
As popularity of Social media sites has increased, companies are trying to make their presence felt and increase their reach to potential customers by creating their corporate profiles and placing ads of their product on these sites. As companies create their presence on these site they also see the potential of providing customer interaction interfaces on these sites so that the customers can reach company through their preferred channel. Also companies are aggressively trying to obtain customer information and preferences by social profiling and data mining through Social CRM interfaces. There are innumerable Social CRM and Social media Listening platform making their way into the market to collect customer related data and provide the same to companies so that companies can utilize the same to improve their sales strategy and customer satisfaction level. The business advantages of Social Media on Inbound Contact Center are as follows: