Social Media – Driving Customer Experience

Context: Context and content create our information future;

Cloud deployment: Deployment on virtualization platform, hosting service

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).

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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:

Improved First call resolution: By maintaining customer social profile information, contact centers agents can give better service to customers. Consider the scenario when a customer call lands on the agent, his social profile and recent social media interactions details would pop-up on Agent screen, giving the Agent additional advantage of knowing customer concerns in real time.

Additional Customer Interaction Channel: Social media can become additional customer interaction channel and allow customers to reach the customer care or company sales interface through their preferred channel.

Exceptional & Innovative customer service: Contact centers in addition to handling customer queries can also provide proactive services to the customer by listening to customer concerns over social media platforms and provide him suggestions and information‘s to meet his needs, thus improving their satisfaction level.

3.2 Impact of Social media on Outbound Contact Center
Contact centers are slowly moving from being a cost center to a profit center. Companies are increasingly using contact center as a medium for up-sell and cross-sell of the products. The popularity of social media as a medium to reach millions of potential customers is making company management sit up and take notice of it as a lucrative channel worth investing.
The business advantages of Social Media as an Outbound Contact Center channel are as follows:

Reach right customers: The major drawback of outbound contact center without social media integration is that it is very difficult to target the right customers. Social media will allow contact centers to listen to people‘s needs and concerns and build a Social CRM profile which can then be used to make effective marketing strategies and target right products and solutions to the right customers.

Preferred Channel & Time: Rather than making voice calls or sending SMS, contact centers are using social media to reach the masses, either by sending tweets about new product launch, or updating the information on their blogs or social network profiles. This gives a better chance of making people to notice and respond.

Outbound Survey: Contact Centers these days are using Social Media channels to reach customers and take surveys. Social Medias have made it possible to reach large number of people within seconds and hence makes it a very effective platform to conduct surveys. Mass feedback would be available immediately which allows companies to make quick strategic decisions and develop new product and solutions as per customer preferences and stay ahead of competitors.

3.3 4 step approach for Social Media Handling:
Huawei proposes 4 step approaches for handling social media through contact center as below:

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Public Opinion refers to the comments and posts by end user and social media users on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, YouTube, Google + etc. Everyday there would be a millions of comments and posts on multiple social media platforms which may address multiple issues or subjects or personal opinions. Enterprises have daunting task of getting or sourcing the relevant information with respect to their enterprise and products.

Monitoring refers to setting of keywords which address topics of interest for an enterprise. Any application which assists enterprise to handle social media is capable of setting keywords and scanning the social media platforms for comments and posts with the keyword mentioned and source the matched comments/posts to enterprise social media handling platform.

Once social media handling application sources the comments and posts, these need to be filtered based on emotion of the post like whether customer has posted it when he is happy or he is angry on some products or it is a neutral comment.

Social media experts or agents in enterprise will handle replies for comments/posts which are necessary and then post it back on social media platform for user to see.

This 4 step approach enable enterprise to handle customers on social media effectively by listening to customer queries/complaints/feedbacks, engaging them in conversation and make them feel important for enterprise and then act on feedback and complaints, thus ensuring total customer satisfaction.

Conclusion:
With the constant change in the communication environment where user and technology also had seen phenomenal change it is very important for service providers to reach the customer proactively and understand their challenges and solve them one important communication tool which dwell well with technology/user/communication environment is the social media tool where there is a quite large number of social media applications and there is a huge probability where most of the customers of the service provider will be using one of them and sharing their experiences

In order to retain their customers amidst the competition the service provider’s face it will become mandatory and not just to have feature in the future where an end to end customer handling/branding and marketing of new products and services will be efficiently handled and serviced.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.