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Social Media as a Customer Interaction Channel

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Social Media as a Customer Interaction Channel

July 14, 2011

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Over the last couple of years, Social Media (also known as “Social Networking”) has clearly taken the centre stage as people are increasingly adopting Social Media to share experiences and ask each other questions on the services and products they are interested in. Large enterprises and leading companies are leveraging and viewing Social Media as a listening platform to get the pulse of their existing and prospective customer’s needs and concerns.


By and large, people prefer to adopt Social Media as a platform to share their experiences and post queries versus directly reaching out to Products and Service Companies because they want to hear from a peer community rather than someone trying to preach and sell the product/service. This fundamental instinct stems from the belief, “Circle of Trust,” that people want to get a first hand feel of their peer communities’ views before going to the respective company for their needs.

Of late, large enterprises have continuously made efforts to penetrate into this circle-of-trust by adopting Social Media as one of their customer service channels in the below areas –

  • Follow customer conversations on Social Networks to understand market and technology trends.
  • Engage with public to proactively support their sales and service needs for customer retention and acquisition.
  • Leverage the Social Media platform for marketing and sales promotions.
  • Establish dedicated customer community forums for virtual support.
  • Thus, it’s imperative that enterprises recognize the importance of following these customer-to-customer conversations to understand the paths to learn, engage and support for business benefits.

Key Drivers

  • Key drivers for enterprises to bank on Social Media as one of their customer interaction channels would be:
  • To enhance customer retention initiatives and opportunities.
  • To channel efforts to focus on tracking and providing world-class support for their customers.
  • To give themselves a competitive edge in the market over their peers.
  • To proactively address customer queries and concerns that is expressed over the public domain.

Certainly not many products or solutions are out in the market to have social media as an integrated customer interaction channel for customer support, thus enterprises that seek a business advantage and act as pioneers in this foray would strongly emerge as global leaders in providing customer support and experience.

Trending and adoption of social media in various business verticals

Let us look at how different industries and their customers have adopted web 2.0 social networking to promote their business and support their present and prospective customers.

1. Retail and Manufacturing:

This is one of the prime industries that uses social media to the maximum extent and beat it to death for almost all kinds of sales promotions, advertisements, campaigns etc. Also, the nature of business in this industry helps use this channel more easily than ever for such marketing. It has now become a mandatory norm for companies to get their brands on most popular social networking sites to raise their profiles and also to create a direct bonding between advertising and sales. Now that retail and social networking can’t be torn apart because of such a huge crowd pulling strategy, social media’s role in retail can no longer be ignored. On the flip side, if a product doesn’t do well, the news can be spread as quickly as a click of a mouse button.

Forrester (News - Alert) research predicts that online sales in UK will grow at a rate of 6 percent a year, hitting £56 billion by 2014 and that there will be 30 million online shoppers this year, increasing to 37 million by 2014.

So Retail is one of those industries that adopted this networking strategy and proactive customer service platform very early.

Adoption Maturity Grading (Scale of 1-10):

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2. Communication Service Providers:

 “Communicate-on-the-go” is the basic paradigm of today’s world, and hence service providers are already opening up their network capabilities towards web 2.0 social networking to offer a fusion of web and Telco environments. Examples of that include Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) applications on iPhone and Blackberry.

Mobile is a ubiquitous personal device through which people get to access, take part in, and capture real-time events versus the traditional way of using a PC to access information about some past event. Mobile phones therefore provide richer social interaction and Twitter on iPhone and Blackberry is a shining example for that.

On average, an individual spends about 50-60 minutes a day on social media and as this continues to climb up, service providers are looking for ways to monetize these successful service models and leverage any advantages they may potentially have.

So, to sum up the reach and adoption of social networks in the service provider industry, more than 100 million Twitter users (and this number is growing) are using micro-blogging services of mobile apps and a substantial percentage population is following tweets through iPhone and Blackberry at any given point in time.

 Adoption Maturity Grading (Scale of 1-10):

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3. Banking and Capital Markets:

Banking needs are lot more “personal” than “social” and they are all relationship based. Banking customers always want to explore and examine options so they have the freedom to choose their banking partners but be very conservative when it comes to sharing personal identities and financial transactions.

Though many people claim social networking is predominantly used by younger demographics that arguably are less apprehensive about sharing identities on public domain, the banking industry as such is bound by financial and security regulations which prohibit exchanging financial transactions over social networks and any attempt to relax the same would result in opening a Pandora’s (News - Alert) Box.

The challenge with this industry is like a double-edged sword for which only a hybrid model would work – Acquaintance, awareness, marketing and comparison can be online and issues/services related to the account or transaction deals have to be offline, i.e. one-to-one.

Financial institutions like Bank of America, American Express and Chase rally behind their customers by crossing the hurdles to provide a first level customer support over social media sites wherein they capture the crux of their customer’s concerns and issues and redirect them to use a secured channel to share necessary details to offer additional support via traditional customer interaction channels like voice, fax, email etc. This trend is picking up, and people prefer this channel, as they don’t have to wait in a queue and reach out for support. Instead, customers voice their concerns or queries in the public domain and banks reach out to them to address the same.

Social media in the banking industry is surely picking up but not into prime stream yet.

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4. Insurance and Healthcare:

Clearly, without surprise this industry has not adopted the social media platform yet, and the reasons are manifold. Insurance is likely not a daily activity and members prefer to ask questions anonymously. Also, the stakeholders who make decisions in this industry aren’t using these social media tools to find answers about their products and services, and insurance customers go to blogs and social media simply to take a peek at the market rates, insurance discount percentages etc., or with some generic insurance or healthcare queries and nothing beyond that.

Thus far, social media in the insurance and healthcare industries has had very little success. However, behind organizations’ firewalls which are impervious to public viewing, few companies have taken the initiative to form an independent websites to encourage customers to discuss rates, health benefits, plans etc., and then address their needs for sales and support. This is no comparison to how other industries are using social media for business and customer support.

So Social media adoption in the insurance and healthcare industries is in infancy as of now and there’s still a long way to go.

Adoption Maturity Grading (Scale of 1-10):

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Way Forward: Social Media – A Hybrid Touch Point

 

Very few contact center solution providers have so far ventured integrating web 2.0 social media as an interaction channel in their product suite, and many of those solutions are still in the conceptual or ideation stage only. Below is a high-level view of how traditional interaction channels can potentially be integrated with Social Media to frame a next generation customer service platform.

  • There are numerous social media monitoring tools available in the market. To name a few: Tweetdeck, Radian6, Cligs, Twazzup, Buzzlogic, etc. can be used to follow and analyze conversations automatically.
  • Meaningful conversations would need to be diagnosed and translated for business needs by means of key-word spotting and trend analysis which would be fed into the contact management engine with the help of predefined business rules and workflows.
  • Input to the contact management engine would be the contact and context information of the conversation spotted.
  • Based on the context information received, a routing engine would then identify the best available skill group or a representative to handle that customer interaction and pass on the contact details to the representative’s desktop via CTI (News - Alert) in the form of a screen-pop or an alert.

With this customer care technology, representatives would have an option from their desktops to view and join conversations with customers to support and address their queries. Alternately, depending on the nature of the conversation, representatives could also choose other traditional interaction channels like voice, email or chat to reach out to the customers. That’s why Social Media is a hybrid touch point for customers as it bridges both traditional (voice channel) and advanced (email, chat, web, fax etc.) channels for customer interactions.

Fig.1 - High-level view of Integrated Social Media Interaction Management

 
SUMMATION

This is an integrated approach to closely follow customer-to-customer conversations and convert opportunities into real business benefits. This solution helps establishing a new service touch point and ensuring that organizations capitalize their customers with a satisfying support experience. This solution effectively bridges the gap between sales and customer service by connecting the right resources with customers from where they are.

Social Media has been and continues to be a cultural phenomenon and rapidly becoming a business phenomenon as well. New communications research indicates that 72% of consumers use social media to research a company’s customer service reputation before making a purchase. Moreover, 74% of consumers say they choose companies and organizations based on the service experiences their friends share on social media sites. So it would be far more bullish for enterprises to adopt this trend and be part of this cultural shift that reaps business benefits and payback in less than 12 months.

Social media as a customer touch point is definitely on the rise and soon going to be an integral part of customer service channel in the coming days!

About the Author

Haroon Rasheed Maitheen is a Technology Architect from Contact Center Technologies CoE of Product Engineering Services business unit at Infosys (News - Alert) Technologies Ltd.


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Edited by Rich Steeves
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