Social Media: a "Mission Critical" Solution for your Contact Center
Don't look now but Social Media is continuing its steady pace down the path of enterprise credibility! If Social Media were an athlete, it would be your #1 prospect or your secret weapon in your arsenal of possibilities. There is little doubt that Social has made its way from the consumer's minds into the enterprise leaders list of top 10 things you need to pay attention to. But can Social Media interactions be considered Mission Critical? Or perhaps more of a Critical Mission?
As long as we have been doing business, we've heard of "The Voice of the Customer" and enterprises have always tried their best to listen to customers as a means of developing offerings that are in line with what the market desires. This is no different today with the exception that consumers, customers, partners and everyone in between have now been given tools that amplify this voice exponentially. Social Media has brought new meaning to what we have always referred to as the Voice of the Customer and it is changing the way purchasing decisions are made. The paradigm shift of this era is that consumers seem to be a lot less interested in what you have to say and more interested in what others like them think of a product or service. Purchasing decision making has largely become about the personal experience that previous buyers have had and are very eager to pass on that experience to others. Humans are social beings with a need to communicate with each other and Social Media is simply offering a way for this to happen. According to a Jive Social Business index survey done by Penn Schoen Berland in May of 2011, 73% of executives agree that Social Media will fundamentally change the way business gets done.
The opportunity for enterprises in this new era of decision making is to harness the potential that comes from this phenomenon and to set a strategy targeting 3 pillars:
Influence the decisions: Not participating in the Social arena means not having a chance to influence your public image and the consumer behavior. Simply put, the question is not "should you engage", it is now more like "how to engage and when". As powerful as the consumer voice now is, so is your opportunity to connect with your stakeholders in a much more meaningful way than ever before. The Social consumer is a different breed that believes in sharing knowledge as a way of making the best decisions, the gains to be had are evident and the cost of doing nothing is very high! Setting a plan that takes you to this first phase is not easy as you quickly realize all the things you don't know but need to know so be patient and always remember to be yourself.
Revolutionize the Customer Experience: Today enterprises engage with their customers in traditional means such as Voice, Web chat and perhaps even video. From the perspective of a Contact Center, Social Media is one more channel of interaction and nothing more. As a customer's Social Media plan begins to take shape and activity starts to rise, the integration into the contact center is a critical component to the long term success of having a successful end to end customer experience. Adding Social as a channel into the Contact Center operation will bring with it benefits of scale, consistency, quality and most importantly, an integrated end to end customer experience as it is not only the Social experience being presented to an agent but the contacts entire history. As a result, the agent can be much more effective and relevant to that customer and their satisfaction.
Re-define Collaboration: an area that too often gets overlooked is Social Media as a ready-made addition to a company's collaboration strategy. In the same way that a social platform such as Facebook or twitter helps consumers make informed decisions, Social Media inside the walls of the enterprise can be a significant contributor to overall workforce efficiency. Say you already offer your users capabilities of Instant Messaging, email, video, knowledge sharing database and now you offer an internal Social platform to bring these pieces together. A platform that is communications enabled and aware of the same presence engines as the others... When you add these components up and you feed it a steady diet of content, you have yourself a community!
We have expanded above on some of the business benefits that come from a Social Media endeavor into the enterprise. Though the hard line monetary benefits are still difficult to quantify, the cost of doing nothing is simply too high to ignore. Is Social Media Mission Critical? Well, Mission Critical is defined as something whose success or failure is deemed critical to the organization meetings its mission and objectives.
What do you think?
