As social media platforms and mobile adoption becomes increasingly integrated into the personal and professional lives of customers, the influence behind what makes social CRM tick is also changing making it that much more important for contact centers to be on board with these new technologies to cater to their customer base. 

A recent webinar provided by Hold-Free Networks and LiquidGrids explored the importance of collecting a wide variety of metrics about online and live interactions as well as the breadth of social influence and why the enterprise requires more tools to fully utilize social media platforms.

Joseph Katz, CMO at Hold-Free, began the presentation setting the stage by defining three key terms necessary for understanding the specific role of influence in the social contact center which included social sentiment, social CRM and social CIM.

According to Katz, CRM (customer relationship management) is constantly evolving and at the stage we are at in terms of technology today, social sentiment is particularly important to breaking down elements in the contact center such as providing the customer with a voice, that allows them to actually tell the story of his or her customer experience rather than completing a survey that makes it hard to gage.

Lance Fried, Hold-Free CEO, went on to discuss the specifics of social influence and how it has changed over the last decade. Back in 2005, the Web was focused on user-generated content that was all about a new author: you. This caused an influx of content which transformed the voice outside of the enterprise to become even stronger for contact centers. By 2011, the Web transitioned to user-generated content to social content, which in the contact center has helped agents understand who is actually providing the feedback to the enterprise.

Fried noted that in today’s social contact centers agents have many different needs including the value of the customer to the enterprise and specific media networks are critical in determining a response. The customer service improvement opportunity for contact centers is instead about mining the social Web in a much more structured, methodical way includes providing triage to separate the issues of the sea of content and conversations out there.

Malcolm Bohm, CEO of LiquidGrids rounded out the webinar by exploring social in vertical markets and defining the who, what, when and how early on to determine how people are connected, how they communicate and how they are influenced to properly address each customers individual needs.

If you missed Hold-Free’s presentation last week, not to worry- you can still access the archived version of the event at any time here.