Enhancing customer experience with social-enabled contact centre
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In response to the rapidly increasing market competition, businesses today place substantial focus on delivering a superior customer experience to differentiate themselves.
To deliver the brand promise, retain customers and increase their lifetime value, more businesses are actively seeking to enhance their customer experiences across all channels including the Internet, mobile, social media, kiosks and call centres.
Social media is the newest communication channel that companies must integrate with their existing processes, technology and customer service channels.
To deliver consistent and relevant brand experiences across touch points and channels, a social-enabled and integrated contact centre needs to be equipped with the following capabilities to build stronger relationships with customers via social interaction.
Three primary capabilities for
social-enabled customer service
Listen and respond: Treat Social Media as an Integrated Interaction Channel
Effective social interaction within the contact centre requires a systematic approach to engage in conversations occurring on social networks. To leverage fully the transformational promise of social media, companies need to empower customer-facing service employees with technologies that enable customer engagement across all channels, with the right answers, at the right time.
Be where your customers are: Take Advantage of Facebook, Twitter and Similar Services
Organisations need to offer a full set of interaction options that their customers are accustomed to, including self-service, crowd (peer-to-peer) service and agent-assisted service.
The solution must leverage a common knowledge foundation to support the workflow and escalation, community moderation tools, and reporting and analytics. All Facebook and other similar interactions should be captured in a common customer record alongside interactions from traditional channels.
Build and leverage community: Connect to Your Customers and Growing Knowledge Processes
Customers are an extensive source of knowledge about companies’ products and services. In fact, some customers will have deeper knowledge than first-level agents.
Companies can enable customers to help each other. However, if the customer “crowd” community does not answer a question in a reasonable amount of time, the thread should be routed to a contact centre agent for resolution.
Enabling customers to help each other – and tie their answers and solutions to core operating processes – allows the organisation to cut support costs and gain credible advocates among their customers.
To further unlock insights holistically across customer interaction channels, organisations should unite, integrate and analyse all of the data in forms of internal and external, and structured, semi-structured and unstructured, to enable better business decisions.
With the capabilities of information discovery and analysis, businesses can improve the relationship with their customers, get to the real root causes behind issues and create new best practices through data analysis.
We have now entered the “age of the customer”, where customers are making decisions that often bypass employees and are interacting directly with their peers via social channels.
Creating a great customer experience starts with knowing exactly who your customers are, their needs, and providing the best recommendations based on their history with the company on record as well as what you have learned through their social presence.
Customers expect a consistent, relevant and personalised experience, and companies’ internal applications and contact systems need to support that.
Sudhisak Chanchamnong is the Thailand manager of applications for Oracle Corporation.
