Social Media

The explosive adoption and skyrocketing volume of social media activity in recent years has literally created a communications revolution, presenting contact center leaders with a whole new set of challenges to face. Even for seasoned professionals who were around for the advent of the prior “new” channels like live chat, e-mail, and even fax, social media is an entirely different animal. Why? Largely because, as a customer-facing organization, you don’t own or have control of these channels, even once you’ve made the decision to leverage them for marketing and/or servicing your products and services.

The stakes have been raised

What’s more is that the stakes are much higher–the interactions that you have with customers through these channels happen real-time on a stage in front of an audience. What starts as a simple service request or complaint that through any other channel would be a one to one interaction is now visible to potentially millions of spectators. Furthermore, the “brand” of a product or service is no longer that which is created and communicated by your marketing organization. It is now the sum total of customers’ experience with it, now typically portrayed to the world through a combination of wall posts, video-blogs, tweets and the like, all at near-lightning speed.

From customer contact center to the new “branded media center”

Being on the “front lines,” the customer contact center typically bears the burden of reconciling any dissonance between this collection of customer experiences and the brand identity that was originally crafted. The good news is that along with these challenges come great opportunities to promote your brand and the service behind it. If you’re consistently meeting customers’ expectations and often even “wowing” them, you’ll have an audience to witness that service excellence and it will quickly become a pillar of your brand identity.

Leverage your opportunities

At Contact Center 411, we combine our depth of experience in customer interaction with our spirit of innovation and keeping abreast of current channels and technologies to bring you the expertise needed to tackle the challenges and leverage the opportunities associated with social media. No matter where you currently sit on the social media adoption continuum, we will roll up our sleeves and get in there with you to take your customer contact operation to a whole new level. Among the ways we can help you in this area are:

Areas of analysis

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  • Identifying and implementing technologies and processes for monitoring communications about your product or service in social media and getting engaged in the conversation
  • Developing a set of standards for responding to social media activity both at an individual level and on a broader scale
  • Building and leveraging user communities and “fans” to help promote your products and/or services and enhance your brand identity.
  • Identifying key metrics and associated objectives around social media channels based on customer expectations and standards for your industry.
  • Operationalizing customer interaction and support through social media into your customer contact center, including role development, organization design, technology deployment, tool and process design and linkage to other key areas like marketing and public relations, which also hold significant stake in and responsibility for social media
  • And much, much more, including just stepping back and assessing your current social media strategy and execution to see how to improve on what you’re doing and what are the logical next steps

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