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Seven Ways to Get Social Media Working Better For You

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Donna Fluss is somebody you want to hear when it comes to the hosted call center space, and she’s offered what she sees as some of the changing needs and expectations for customer service.

Perhaps one of her most salient observation is that “‘going social’ is more than a way to share thoughts and ideas; it is a new way of communicating and interacting.” True enough, but most organizations still don’t have much of a clue how to best use social media, especially when it comes to customer service. They have a vague sense that it’s something they need to be doing, but exactly what, well, they don’t know.

So Fluss identifies seven “activities and actions” that organizations can consider as ways to incorporate social media into their customer service and contact center organizations:

“Put together a committee with members from sales, marketing and service, and build a social media strategy; the strategy specifies who is responsible for responding to social media feedback and how to use it on a proactive basis.” Useful as long as the committee doesn’t become hopelessly ineffectual through lack of leadership and focus, as committees can be.

“Create a company persona, and attempt to support it using a variety of social media channels.” Which she’ll explain how to do in subsequent articles, as it’s not exactly intuitive.

“Pull some your best agents and assign them to handle social media interactions.” The idea here is to give feedback on a timely basis. Like what people using social media expect.

“Create Facebook, LinkedIn (News - Alert) and Twitter accounts.” Then when you’ve done that, get someone from marketing to handle the social media interactions.

“Invite customer service to create a social media service strategy.” This would include figuring out social media feedback and setting up a structure to respond to it consistently.

“Invest in text analytics.” Why? Because it’s a good way to automate the handling of social media interactions, Fluss says, “which can function as an early warning system for the enterprise.”

“Route social media interactions to the contact center.” Just like you’d do with any other interaction, first come first served.