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Meeting Customer Expectations in the Social Media Channels
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Meeting Customer Expectations in the Social Media Channels

December 11, 2014

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By Tracey E. Schelmetic,
TMCnet Contributor

As holiday shoppers turn to the Internet to accomplish more of their end-of-the-year gift buying – those people who like to wait in Black Friday (News - Alert) lines notwithstanding –are increasingly sharing their experiences with one another and are willing to be guided by the advice of friends, family and strangers. Social media enables this in a big way.


For this reason, it’s critical for companies to pay attention to their social media presence all year round, but particularly during the holidays, given that most retailers make or break their year’s revenue at this time of year. Companies need to tread carefully, because errors can be multiplied many times over in the social realm, according to a recent blog post by David Erickson (News - Alert) writing for the Success @ Creative PR Blog.

“The customer who is frustrated because your discount code is not registering during the checkout process on your Web site is not just complaining to you when they @ you on Twitter (News - Alert), they’re talking to anyone who is reviewing your Twitter feed for deals as well,” he wrote. “Conversely, the customer who leaves a glowing review on your Facebook (News - Alert) page has just sung your praises to a much larger audience than at any time of the year.”

Social media monitoring is absolutely critical at a minimum. More successful companies are doing more than listening. They are actively engaging customers in two-way conversations via social media from the contact center. The companies doing this and doing it successfully are able to build social media channels into their multichannel contact center operations, largely because they are using on-demand contact center solutions that enable social channels. At the holidays, it’s particularly important to dedicate sufficient resources to these social channels.

“Ensure you have sufficient staff dedicated to monitoring and responding to any customer service issues that arise on social media,” wrote Erickson. “Base your staffing decisions on the baseline you normally devote to handling customer service issues times the volume increase you expect during the holidays.”

On-demand contact center solutions providers such as Five9 offer social and mobile modules that can be integrated directly into the broader contact center operations. Companies can gain quick access to the tools they need to manage social engagement based on their most critical key performance indicators (KPIs), just as they would with phone calls, e-mails or other types of contacts. Five9 Social, for example, allows agents to respond to problems and issues posted to social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (News - Alert), blogs, articles, and online communities. They can handle the issues in the social channels, or escalate the customers to more immediate channels such as telephone.

It’s a way to ensure that issues posted in social media don’t “get away” from a company and take on a life of their own. Increasingly, customers expect service via social channels. Companies that don’t meet customer expectations today generally don’t survive for very long.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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