Hosted by Siemens Enterprise Communications, this roundtable discussed how social media will change the way in which businesses interact with their customers.
Instead of tweeting their responses or updating their statuses, our attendees engaged in some old fashioned face-to-face communication.
They talked about how firms should best react to feedback on blogs or messageboards, how this form of communication is best monitored and what sort of agent should be recruited to deal with these sorts of queries in what turned out to be a thought-provoking discussion....
People are using social media to talk about your business. You need to accept that, and work out how you are going to deal with it. That was the overriding message at the Call Centre Focus and Siemens Enterprise Communications roundtable at Gordon Ramsays Maze restaurant in Londons Mayfair on 20 May.
No matter the industry or size, no matter whether its Twitter or Facebook, this is a phenomenon which is going to profoundly change the way businesses deal with their customers.
The biggest challenge will be managing the flow of information about the brands, products and services that occur within social media channels, including micro blogs (such as Twitter) social networking sites (such as Facebook), blogs and online forums.
Consumers are spreading the word about the brands they like, and more importantly, brands they dont. A search on Twitter revealed a welter of complaint and commendation about the brands, whose leaders were sitting around the table.
Customer service bosses from Orange, nPower, ITV and others were beginning to grapple with just how they might react to this mass of information in their contact centres, and even how they might develop strategies to make sure they are at the centre of those conversations.
Kathryn Penn, technical sales expert - contact centres (EMEA) with Siemens Enterprise Communications said, “Companies might intercept Twitter messages and bring those conversations within a safer environment, where complaints might be resolved and customer loyalty built.” Everyone agreed that this was a positive scenario.
Orange, nPower and Photobox were all already in conversations in exactly this way, they maintained.
For the outsourcers around the table, the issue was pressing. Keith Price, managing director of Teleperformance said, “My clients are already coming to me and asking me what they are supposed to do about these new communication channels. Clients dont know what they want, but they definitely dont want to pay!”
True to form, the outsourcers around the table were seeking to work out whether this might represent an opportunity.
Does analysing and reacting to conversations in Twitter, for example, add cost or remove it from the contact centre, asked Philip Shuldham Legh, group sales and marketing director for the Listening Company. Does intercepting a complaint in the social media environment mean that they have prevented an expensive succession of calls into the contact centre? Possibly; perhaps even probably was the answer! Monitoring conversations about their brands online, and reacting to them, was beginning to look like a win for everyone.
But as Ben Kay, head of service access strategy, service strategy and planning with Orange points out, “The original conversation happened in public yet the resolution happened in private. This leaves a hanging conversation where the rest of the world only knew the negative side of the argument.”
He added that the skill to effectively engage in the conversation in the first place, and then resolve the problem in a professional way, was not one necessarily held by todays standard agent as a matter of course.
Might a new type of agent be required to effectively manage this conversation then? The room thought so. They would probably be younger (a digital native), more technology savvy and more literate. They would also have to be trusted to project a corporate brand in what is a necessarily fast-paced environment. Someone posting a comment to a company on Twitter, for example, expects a response within about an hour, all agreed. So the agent must be fast and accurate.
But they must also be able to project an image which was subtle. David Payne, managing director of Maia made the point that the digital natives of Facebook, blogs and messageboards were very resistant to manipulation. “Reviews written by public relations professionals on Amazon are far more likely to offend than acclaim,” he added. So agents managing such conversations had to be capable of avoiding trading in clumsy marketing messages.
That is why social media is such a complex channel for companies to grapple with. Traditional media offers companies channels to broadcast a message. Social media is more a way of listening. Technology was critical here, the group agreed. There needs to be a way of somehow cutting out the noise, then being able to integrate the customer, or potential customer, within the companys existing CRM software or call centre software suite and only then making an intervention, if appropriate.
How many marketing managers were capable of such a subtle and instinctive an approach? How many chief executives? Perhaps companies would have to pay more money for these capable agents, then. Perhaps they might even have to pay journalists in order for them to be able to manage these increasingly complex tasks, thought some. Would these people even be agents? This opened perhaps the most interesting discussion of the day.
Is responding to social media a function which belongs in the contact centre? Steve Morris, head of viewer services with ITV thought not. It was, he thought, too complex. And yet, the software to respond in an integrated way already existed naturally within the contact centre in some form, so whichever part of the business became responsible would begin to look like a contact centre anyway.
There was no resolution to this dichotomy. This problem is in its infancy, so it is hardly surprising. But its also shows just how difficult a problem companies, and contact centres, are facing in the current marketplace.
Social Media - the statistics:
38 - The percentage of bloggers posting brand or product reviews
130 - The average number of friends for each Facebook user
140 - The maximum number of characters allowed in each tweet on Twitter
3million - The number of LinkedIn users in India, the fastest growing country to use the site
14m - The number of articles on Wikipedia
50m - The amount of tweets sent each day, sent by Twitter users around the world
400m - The total number of active users for Facebook at the present time
25billion - The number of pieces of web content including web links, news stories and blog posts shared each month on Facebook
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