What are the nine critical steps to owning your business’s social media reputation in the contact center? Servion answers that question, and many others, in its just released whitepaper of the same name.
Shankaran Nair, President–Corporate Strategy and Head Global Delivery, Servion Global Solutions, participated in a fascinating Q&A with Loyalty360 to offer his insights on the whitepaper.
Why should marketers today invest in social media?
It’s a no brainer that consumers (across all industries) today are on social media. For just about anything. Be it for information, to complain or to transact. And if that is where consumers are, it is only right to take all marketing conversations to social media and meet them where they are. Not just marketing conversations, but conversations spanning the entire organization. Let me hasten to add however, that all of this must be carefully done keeping
in mind the brand, the promise it makes to its customers and the business objectives thereof. More like a holistic thinking beginning with strategy of why a particular organization should be on social media and finishing with execution–watching out for moving parts along with way and adjusting/tweaking as necessary.
How can social media impact customer engagement, customer experience, and customer loyalty?
If organizations meet consumers where they want to be met, a large part of tactical customer engagement is taken care of. If we look at this strategically, engaging on social media gives the organization a far more holistic view of who they are dealing with, likes / dislikes and transaction history. Servicing a consumer using the power of such detailed data hugely increases satisfaction, consequently impacting experience and ultimately loyalty. For example, the contact center of a bank is watching consumer trends of social media. They see that one consumer has been repeatedly trying to complete an online purchase for the past half hour and has not been successful. Complaints start appearing across several social media channels. Finally, the call hits the contact center. The agent who’s dealing with this particular consumer has all the history and services the call from the point where complaints started appearing. Efficiency, effectiveness, and experience all jump to a very different and relevant perspective. Both for the organization and the consumer.
What are the nine critical steps to owning your company’s social media process and reputation for contact centers?
Define your business’ social media purpose and strategy
Ensure relevant ownership
Understand potential customer threats
Create an ecosystem that allows a two way conversation
Keep pace with the consumer
Find the right tools and equip the Contact Center with social mining capabilities
Integrate with other channels
Train Contact Center agents
Stick to a plan
Can you describe the importance of each step in a sentence or two?
Before you embark on the journey of social media, it is extremely critical that you understand the reasoning behind why you want to be a part of the social space and how you’re planning to attract, engage, and communicate with customers. A good place to start is your brand promise and brand personality. So, what does your brand promise to the consumer? What is the tone of communication? How do you want the consumer to perceive you and the service you provide? The answers to these questions will help lay the foundation for your social strategy.
Ensure relevant ownership
If you have multiple users (or the wrong user) managing your brand’s presence on separate social networks, your brand’s story could be pulled in several different directions due to messages with an inconsistent voice. With the wrong person or team owning your social presence, what may have started out as cohesive strategy, could very well end up as an aimless tactical activity that harms your reputation. Clearly, the function that owns the brand should become the ultimate owner of the business’ social media network.
Understand potential customer threats
When you consider the scale of vulnerability or threat social media has on organizations, it’s truly astounding. While this opportunity of instant engagement presents a strong opportunity to reach out to your audience and interact with them, at the same time you are leaving yourself open to an attack every time a customer is unhappy with your product or service. It’s a double-edged sword. Establish a plan to listen, quickly resolve issues, effectively manage and monitor your social presence across all networks.
Create an ecosystem that allows a two way conversation
Consumers are perpetually ready to begin a conversation with you. Waiting for them to reach out to you could be detrimental to your objective of establishing a genuine, engaging “face” for your business. For the first time, social media gives you the chance to have a two-way conversation with your customer. Provide for it and use it well.
Keep pace with the consumer
Simply following consumer conversations on social media will allow organizations to either proactively reach out to them or service them relevantly at different points in time.
Find the right tools and equip the contact center with social mining capabilities
Social media tools enable organizations to keep abreast of what their consumers and to-be consumers are saying. It helps them quickly identify social media conversations most relevant to their business. These tools gather data on interactions from social media channels and analyze data using intelligent engines.
Integrate with other channels
To create a lasting impression on a customer, brands need to go beyond just providing a great product or service. The extent to which you can accomplish this lies in how well you know your customer. The technology choices you make in the contact center now become key. Integrating your social channels with voice and other media allows your agents to have access to priceless information (360-degree view of transactions) while dealing with a customer.
Train contact center agents
Agents managing your social media interactions need to be solution-oriented, but also creative in a way that ensures the solutions they provide customers are unique and significant. So, while you train them for specific scripting and treatment, train them to understand the freedom of innovating on the fly and where it can create maximum impact.
Stick to a plan
Creating an ecosystem where everything works from a plan, yet feels spontaneous to the customer, is imperative with social media. It is very important that stakeholders across the company get together and work out a strategy. Marketing, Customer Service, and IT need to be at the same table to decide the exact workflow for every potential situation and how empowered agents and other front-line personnel will play a role in making the plan work.
Where do you predict social media will be in five years, as far as a tool retailers can use to engage with customers?
Tough to predict where social media will be in five years, when it’s hard to predict where it will be two years from now. Perhaps a more relevant way of looking at this question is the direction the experience/service industry would like to see social media take. Currently,
it is being used as an online complaint forum. Recipient of bad service, unhappy about something, got short changed–go to Social Media, rave and rant. This unfortunately has organizations jumping around all over the place to ‘correct’ a bad situation. It will work for the industry if the power of this tool is truly harnessed to service the consumer relevantly and use it to build memorable experiences. Because the power and potential is there. All it will take is an enlightened organization to start the trend. Others will surely follow.