Call Recording Featured Article

If you do any research on the topic of social media and the contact center, you’ll find that folks have been writing about this topic for a number of years now. It may not seem like social media could have been around for that long, but it’s like anything else that creeps up on you while you’re busy paying attention to all of the usual pressing matters in the contact center and putting out the occasional fire.

The reality is lots and lots of people now use social media daily as a matter of course, and their use of social media has a direct impact on the contact center. In fact, this past spring Philippe Ougrinov reported  that the topic of main concern to attendees of Contact Center World held in Berlin was Social Media Customer Care.

There’s a reason for that. Studies have shown that customers complain loudly on social media channels about poor customer service experiences and use social media channels to research companies before dealing with them. ICMI reported over a year ago that a study by the Society of New Communications Research (News - Alert) (SNCR) revealed that 59 percent of people participating in the study claim they use social media on a regular basis to "vent" about their negative customer care experiences. The ICMI article also said the SNCR study documented that 72 percent of its study participants reported they have used social media for researching the reputation of a company in terms of the customer care it offers prior to purchasing from the company. In addition, 74 percent said their decisions to buy from a company are influenced by what others share online.

 If this reality is just now rudely smacking you in the face (figuratively, of course), there are some critical things call center managers need to do to be sure their contact center operations are prepared to handle the addition of a social media channel to their multichannel marketing efforts, and to do so as if they had been doing it all along.

One of those things is ensuring their contact centers are properly staffed to handle the social media channel traffic. Monet Software, a provider of workforce management software, provided some thoughts on what “properly staffed” means. In a recent blog post  it mentioned that first, contact center s need to have agents who are multi-skilled and trained to handle the nuances of social media.

The next and equally critical step is to be sure these trained and multi-skilled agents are properly   “scheduled and available to interact with customers based on calls, email, chat and the new social media channels.” That, of course, means contact center managers will need to have the right technology deployed to not only perform the scheduling functions of workforce management, but to “track and monitor the social activity, the engagement with customers and the overall performance” of the contact center.

Monet Software has made a commitment to sharing information helps contact center managers to include social media into their multi-channel contact center, so it offers a wealth of tips and ideas via its Twitter handle .

If you really want to get your multi-channel contact center up to date to include a social media channel, check out Monet’s Twitter (News - Alert) profile. It addresses topics such as forecasting and scheduling, motivating employees, managing absenteeism, and best practices for call center managers and supervisors.