Enabling Successful Social Media Customer Care

Enabling Successful Social Media Customer Care

50 Years of Growth, Innovation and Leadership
Enabling Successful Social Media Customer Care
Understanding Social Media and Operationalizing it for the Contact Center
A Frost & Sullivan
White Paper
www.frost.com
Frost & Sullivan
Introduction.............................................................................................................................4
Social Media Contact Center Context.................................................................................4
Social Media Challenges.........................................................................................................5
Social Media Opportunities...................................................................................................5
Social Strategies and Tactics..................................................................................................5
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................7
CONTENTS
Enabling Successful Social Media Customer Care
INTRODUCTION
Among the challenges and opportunities facing contact centers today, Frost & Sullivan has
identified four critical themes: enabling social media in customer care; deploying home agents;
complying with stringent security requirements; and providing private cloud functionality.
Frost & Sullivan has published white papers that address each of these issues.
The topic of social media is well worth focusing on first, as it is currently generating
considerable buzz within the industry. Indeed, social media has arrived as a new and very
different communication channel. Well-publicized incidents like “United Breaks Guitars” have
sent a clear message to companies—customers will use social media to vent as well as praise
good customer care. Companies, therefore, need to listen and respond quickly to such insights.
After all, consumers can impact brand, image and sales by sharing their opinions and experiences.
But the larger question is how best to operationalize social media by monitoring and taking
action within the contact center. Most firms are still trying to figure out how best to interact
with customers via this channel. Which department should be responsible for social media?
How to staff, train, and provide agents with the tools they’ll need?
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTACT CENTER CONTEXT
First, let’s look at the construct of social media and then examine that in the context of
the contact center. Social media is, after all, media. It is fundamentally different from all
other customer engagement channels in that it transmits public conversations rather than
private ones. Employees who engage in public conversations are acting as spokespersons.
When they post or tweet, it’s no different than if they were live on TV or radio. In essence,
public conversations follow a unique set of engagement rules; an individual’s comments are
broadcast and re-broadcast to a far wider audience. With this comes greater responsibility
from companies and their employees. It is critical to capture the audience’s attention, ensure
accuracy, and promote and protect the brand. There is much less room for error.
In the contact center context, social media becomes a customer collaboration tool for
monitoring conversations and interacting. Firms may choose to capture, analyze, and
forward these conversations to other departments. In today’s environment, marketing and
communications is often the first point of entry. The contacts are then forwarded to customer
service. Customer service can then decide to have the contact center answer comments,
Facebook posts or Twitter feeds. Another option is to have agents engage in a group dialogue
with customers on moderated collaboration sites. Finally, agents might decide to make certain
conversations private and more personalized.
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SOCIAL MEDIA CHALLENGES
There are several challenges in supporting social media in the contact center. First, many people
prefer to be anonymous, which makes it very difficult to know whether they are customers or
prospects. Second, some information might be sensitive (consider credit card numbers) and
cannot be released publicly. Third, social media requires a different set of procedures and agent
skill sets, not unlike those needed for corporate communications.
SOCIAL MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES
There are several key opportunities through engaging customers via social media:
• Improved customer service. As a public conversation, social media can resolve not just a
single consumer’s issue, but those of other individuals who may share the same product or
service challenge. Social media permits peer service, which taps into individual expertise
and knowledge.
• Sales and business development. With social media, customers that experience delight
with companies become the new marketers. Social media provides a richer and more
accurate evaluation of customer value. This is done through tracking and assessing
customers’ ability to influence others.
• Early warning of problems and opportunities. Another upside of social media is that
companies can eavesdrop on what customers are really thinking and saying. This gives
them an early warning mechanism attuned to customer issues, opportunities, intelligence
on competitors, and ideas for new products and services. Social media then acts as a nocharge, free-flowing, focus group.
• Driving efficient communications between marketing and customer service. Too often,
the marketing department launches promotions that the contact center has little
knowledge of. With social media, the resulting customer annoyance is spread to a far
larger audience, thereby intensifying the negative impacts on brand image and reputation.
Social media can be the catalyst that forces these two organizations to work with
greater synergy.
SOCIAL STRATEGIES AND TACTICS
To be successful with social media, firms must create a single department responsible for
customer engagement strategy across all media. Ongoing participation by other departments,
including corporate communications and legal, would be ideal. This area can be a crossfunctional interdepartmental working group or a merger of customer service and marketing.
The goal is to get everyone on the same page, working closely together. Along the way,
companies need to establish formal social media workflows.
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Enabling Successful Social Media Customer Care
As the chart below illustrates, social media adoption and integration into companies and
contact centers is a continuous process. Frost & Sullivan findings show that most companies
are moving from phase I to phase II.
Penetration/Extent of Adoption
Current stage of adoption for
most companies—moving
from Phase I to Phase II
Phase IV
Social Media as a Customer
Communication Channel
Phase III
Companies interact with
customers through
Social Media
Phase II
• Social Media becomes
an established contact
channel, to the extent
of replacing websites
and contact centers
• Advanced customer
behavior analytics
• Well-developed
monetizing strategies
• Central to a company’s
marketing and customer
strategy
• Companies leverage data gathered
through previous phases and use analytic
tools to build real time picture of the
brand
• Engage directly with customers; sites
such as Facebook become first point of
contact for customers
Social Media as a
Marketing Platform
Phase I
• Companies target messages to suit audience and use
Facebook or Twitter for product promotion and deals
• Limited customer interaction
Listen and
Monitor
• Initial stage of adoption where companies begin to track
what customers are saying about the brand.
• Little or no interaction with customers
Maturity of Strategy Over Time
Source: Frost & Sullivan Analysis
Here are the key emerging social media tactics:
• Acknowledge the outcome of conversations on social media so that the public knows that
the company cares about offering a rewarding customer experience.
• Select which social media channels best meet the company’s customer engagement
models. At the same time, actively encourage dialogue between social media participants
so as to increase enthusiasm for a product or service. Increased usage drives brand loyalty.
• Some companies identify agents publicly with their names and faces. There are benefits
and challenges to this approach. It creates a direct personal connection with customers
and is aligned with social media users’ expectations. On the other hand, it places agents
squarely in the public eye, limiting their privacy.
• Build customers’ social profiles, track their social activities, analyze their comments, and
assess their influence.
• Examine and pick the right mix of technologies. There is a wide variety of monitoring,
analytics, routing, profiling and collaboration tools on the market.
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• Build metrics that map to expected volumes and acceptable response times. Decide
whether to have a dedicated social media team or one that will also answer chat, e-mail,
SMS/text, and live agent calls.
• Determine skills sets, training, and policies. Agents must have exceptional comprehension
and writing abilities, and be savvy in the use of social media. Policies should also specify
what content employees are permitted to publish via social media.
• Set up strict monitoring and procedures so that comments are routed to the correct
department (e.g., corporate communications, legal, marketing, and customer service).
Install real-time agent monitoring and recording capability.
CONCLUSION
Frost & Sullivan believes that social media is here to stay as a permanent customer contact
channel. While fraught with challenges, it also comes with tremendous opportunities for
improving customer engagement and relationship-building. By understanding what social media
means in the contact center context, companies can select the right mix of strategies and
tactics to successfully engage with customers over this exciting new medium.
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ABOUT FROST & SULLIVAN
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, partners with clients to accelerate their growth. The company’s
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culture that generates, evaluates, and implements effective growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan employs over 50 years of
experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from more
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