South Africa’s largest mobile telephone communications service provider, Vodacom (News - Alert), will install a social media solution from Genesys (News - Alert) to integrate social media response into its contact center operations. The company said it had selected Genesys Social Engagement to deliver automatic social media responses to customers across its entire customer service and contact center system.
“Social media has changed the way we interact with our colleagues, family, and friends, and it’s now transforming customer service,” Paul Segre (News - Alert), president and CEO of Genesys, commented in a company statement. “Vodacom recognizes the value of delivering cross-channel customer conversations. We are pleased that they have chosen Genesys Social Engagement to help integrate their Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter channels into their overall customer experience.”
The addition of social media capabilities to Vodacom’s contact centers, which already employ Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM), will allow the mobile service provider to increase its engagement with customers on media platforms whose popularity with the public is rapidly expanding. Vodacom’s contact centers receive roughly 16 million calls every month. The Genesys social media solution will allow blended e-services agents operating within the contact center’s system to conduct non-voice interactions including chat, SMS, web call-back and email.
The deployment comes as part of Vodacom’s ongoing social media campaign, which the company considers a success. Prior to the installation of the Genesys solution, Vodacom had been responding to social media requests manually. However, the growing volume of social media interactions had begun to exceed the customer service team’s ability to deal with all of them, in addition to other duties, and the company sought an automated response solution.
With Genesys Social Engagement Vodacom agents employ existing routing, reporting and agent desktop technologies to react to social media communications. Social media become an element of the company’s cross-channel customer service effort to increase customer interaction. The solution uses Twitter (News - Alert) and Facebook, Vodacom's primary social media channels, to respond to social media messages.
Automation is a critical feature of the Genesys Social Engagement Platform since it allows Vodacom to adjust operations at times when customer interaction volume is high. The solution permits agents to transition quickly and easily from one mode of contact to another, switching from social media channel to web call-back or email as desired by the customer.
“With a corporate mission of 'making every customer smile,' our goal is to be responsive. Ultimately, social media is just another channel for our customers to get hold of us,” said Eben Dreyer, solution development manager at Vodacom. “By integrating the Genesys Social Engagement solution within our existing Genesys system we can effectively handle the growing numbers of social media queries. A posting on a website may be only part of an interaction a customer may be having with us, so it is important that we have a highly integrated approach that allows us to uniformly handle all interactions.”
Edited by Jennifer Russell