Lately, we have seen social media mainly used in marketing because it originally started as an advertising medium, but now it is becoming more of contact center tool, moving to the customer service side of a business.
Social media is causing businesses to understand that it’s more important than ever to improve customer communication. Specifically, the increasingly popular mobile phone is creating high expectations from customers including social media integration, but companies must understand just how to use social media to better serve their customers.
Although social media integration is different for every company, you must take a look at what your customers really want. At an ITEXPO (News - Alert) session “De-Mystifying Social Media Integration in the Customer Service Environment” Rick McFarland of Voice4Net discussed how contact centers can use social media improve the customer-company relationship.
“People haven’t looked under the hood of social media – it’s a true demographic psychographic database that you should be taking advantage of,” said McFarland.
There must be proactive marketing within the contact center, and social media provides that strategy. “Social media provides extra ears for marketing to find out information about what their customers want,” said McFarland. “It has become a listening device for companies.”
With this move toward social media in the contact center, there has been an emerging proactive customer service side turning social media analytics into queues in order to create a proactive action by contact center team members.
“What I see down the line, now that there is a social media tool on the agent desktop, contact centers can use that tool for addition sales and survey functions, which can be put onto social media sites,” said McFarland.
While contact centers are growing today, social media is actually generating more voice calls because of all of the other ways that the customer wants to communicate.
“You need mechanisms in your contact center to allow for those different media connectivity functions,” said McFarland.
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Edited by Brooke Neuman