Actionable Social Media for the Call Center

From Upstream Works Software

Social Media

» Broad Brush concept

»Should be broken down to better sub-categories»Allows assignment to appropriate business

divisions

»Only some areas pertain to contact center

» “Social response”

Social Media Types

» Community

» Advertising 2.0

» Blogging

» Social Response

Communities

Roots in usenet and bulletin boards

Sharing common interests

Promotes peer interactivity

Not commercial in nature

Selling is very very bad here!

Communities – US Auto Parts

Corporate ‘for profit’ site

Designed to sell auto parts

User experience and value is first and foremost

Parts sales seems like an afterthought

Advertising 2.0

Active ‘outbound’ engagement

Positioned in interactive social environments

Interactively gain engagement and branding

Advertising 2.0

Rogers Facebook presence

Actively soliciting ‘Like’ button acceptance

Increases popularity and relevance of the company

Gains user demographic information

Blogging

Standard blogging is “new media”

Handle through standard PR channels

Micro blogging

TwitterFacebook wall postsYouTube commentsBlog commentsCommunity comments

Social Response

» “Throwing it out there”

» Users engaging interactively through Twitter

»Businesses reviewing posts to find issues and kudos

»Users often expecting a valid corporate response

» Very low numbers but public nature means high impact

Social Media Sites

Forums and Newsgroups

Facebook; MySpace; Twitter; YouTube

Many Others – LinkedIn; Flickr; Quora; Spoke; Foursquare

List @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

Social Media Popularity

» Facebook >500m (Alexa #2)

» YouTube (Alexa #3)

» Twitter - 75m (Alexa #9)

» Linkedin - 50m (Alexa #13)

» My Space 100m (Alexa #130)

» Other Alexa Ranks

» Spoke -7478

» Quora – 1054 and rising

» Flickr - 36

» Foursquare – 735 and rising fast!

» Slideshare - 183

*As of Dec 5 2011

Communities

An ‘online’ meeting

Focus group?

Monitor and engage with customerS

Not an inbound or outbound interaction with an individual

Therefore not “contact center”

Advertising 2.0

Marketing in its purest form

Creation of web media

Reward programs

“Sign up to win”

Branding

Therefore not contact center

Blogging

» PR 2.0

»Blogging is the latest form of newspaper article

»Journalistic standards are more lax»Less review; less legal concern

» Should be monitored as part of PR

Social response

Why people tweet about you:

They love you

They have no opinion of you (est 60%)

They hate you

Contact Center Operations

Contact centers handle interactions with “customers”

Interactions are directed to the business (inbound)

Interactions are directed from the business (outbound)

Channel is unimportant

Contact centers do not handle all types of social media!

Designed for social response

How Not to Engage

Social Response - Complaints

» Has the call center failed already?

» Looking for retribution not resolution?

» Discussions are public

» Squeaky wheels

» Is this the best use of call center resources?

»Number are low; impact is disproportionally high

United Breaks Guitars

» Youtube sensation

» Materially affected United Airlines stock during merger

» Touted as the bogey man of social media

» 100% due to a failure of the contact center!!!!!

Social Call Center Concerns

Privacy restrictions

Increasingly onerous

Users are anonymous

Need to identify specific customer identifiers

High signal to noise ratio

Can’t “firehouse” every referenceNeed to intelligently filter content on intent

Salesforce (Radian6); Scoutlabs; Simplify360

Problem Resolution

» Directly engage with customers

»Response time is important»How long is that tweet public before you resolve it?

» Identify specific interaction causes

»Resolution time is important»How long is that tweet public before you resolve it?

» One off or systematic problem area?

» Resolve accordingly

Current Examples

» National mobile phone company

» Six million subscribers

» Has two guys manually trolling through Social Media feeds to take action.

» Tier 1Telco

» Customers tweeting because response time is faster than web tickets

» Not Scalable

» Look forward to the day of “Your Tweet is very important to us. We are experiencing heavier than normal volumes…”

The power of social media?

United Breaks Guitars

9,982,221 Youtube views

Twitter Average

“Average Twitter User has 126 followers…”http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/29/twitter-users-average-api-traffic

Example: NB Power

380,000 customers

433 followers (0.11%)

Demise of the call center?

» Customers still want to engage initially by phone to the call center

» The demise of the phone is highly overrated

»My opinion FWIW

Contact

» Rob McDougall

» rmcdougall@upstreamworks.com

» www.upstreamworks.com

» 905 660 0969 x 358

» Twitter: @up_rmcd

» See the full webinar recording at www.upstreamworks.com

Recommendations

» Divide social media into multiple component areas

» Marketing, PR (proactive) and contact center (reactive)

» Implement ‘scanning software that will filter the incoming results

» Assign call center staff to resolve public customer issues

» Create customer interactions

» Timely identification of call center failures

» Provide specific resolutions

About Upstream Works Software

Business Interaction Mangement