In order to deliver proper customer support using social media, organizations need to include a variety of fresh support channels. The organizations are also under tremendous pressure for delivering high volume customer satisfaction in real-time.
Customer service teams in a contact center have to monitor social media through service information, traffic management, resourcing and a Customer Relationship Management point of view.
There is no doubt that they can pose tough challenges in the future. Your business activities have to be raised to stay in sync with the increasing demand, as well as, being a step ahead of the customer and for that a call center needs to monitor beyond Twitter and Facebook and include news sites, YouTube, niche forums and blogs too.
There are a host of social media channels that makes it quite tough to monitor them all on an ongoing basis in real-time. There are several social monitoring applications that can only track the ‘owned’ channels of an organization and those that have been specifically designed for managing reputation can be good for sending alerts when there are sudden increases in the ‘band mentions’. There are some other applications that may not provide analytics and detailed reporting that call centers need for meeting targets related to service quality and efficiency. Hence, it is imperative that a call center chooses a social media application with great deliberation.
The key focus of a call center’s monitoring can be predicted to a great extent from its own industry since each industry will have its own unique focus. How and what should be monitored is based on the needs of a particular client. While a gaming client will have a large part of its interactions on forums, a cosmetic company will be more interested in online influencers and blogs.
Another key thing to consider is that when customers seek redress on a particular social media, they may have high expectations with respect to follow-up and response-times. Call centers that are forward-thinking have thus gave a strong focus to accomplish their meeting needs within only one interface.
Selecting a proper social monitoring application is a critical decision that will require cautious consideration. The only enabler in this case is the software. But you will still require the right staffs to use it so that maximum potential can be derived from it.
It has been for quite some time that the marketing and the PR departments have been into social media monitoring and now it is the turn of the customer service to do so in a big way.
Why social media monitoring applications are becoming popular?
From the perspective of a consumer, it is simple to understand why the trend to do so is catching up. There are many customers who are antagonized with the processes of a contact center. The very fact that any complaint that has been made on a social media is instantly visible to a large number of online users provides an edge to them over their business rivals that are completely horrified with the prospect of their reputations getting damaged. However, there is no doubt that despite whatever its detractors may say; the key reasons why many contact centers are using social media monitoring applications are as follows.
- To get customer advocacy
- Lower the customer support costs
- To improve loyalty of its existing customers and customer satisfaction
In order to accomplish this goal, about 94 percent of the best brands have been concentrating on lowering the time for problem resolution. This will help to decrease costs. More importantly, when a user of social media finds that his complaint has been efficiently and speedily resolved, he will approach your call center again in the future and recommend them publicly to others.
Another crucial role of a social media monitoring application is that it is easy to identify trends more quickly. Now that would mean you can recognize, as well as, resolve problems that are recurring in nature to make sure that such thing does not occur to your other customers. Moreover, a social media platform can generate an early alert if there is a particular issue with a service or a product.
It is evident that contact center need put in a lot of effort in this direction. As on date just about 71 percent of the “top performing brands” along with approximately 41 percent of “others” respond to the customer complaints actively with roughly about 25 percent having no remedy for complaints made on Facebook. What needs to be also considered in this discussion is that on an average, the response time for customer queries over social media is more than 24 hours while the same over phone is only 2 minutes.
Though, some customers may feel that the social media monitoring application may not be an easy and fast solution, with the rapid and constant advancement in technology, call centers are adopting more efficient and robust processes and there has been significant improvement.