Use Social Media to Turn Your Contact Center Into an Opportunity Center
Recently, we sat down with Mike Ellsworth of Social Media Performance Group to talk about the social media enabled contact center. Our full discussion is available on the Bright Pattern website as a recorded webinar and available as a podcast as well.
Mike Ellsworth has been buying enterprise technology solutions for more than 20 years. He’s also the co-author of the book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success. One of the many topics in the book is social media customer service.
Bright Pattern: Mike, what is social media customer service?
Mike Ellsworth: Social media customer service involves using social media to improve the customer experience. Whether it’s finding out more about the customer’s background and interests before responding to a query, or monitoring social sites in real time to discover customer needs before they become problems, social customer service is an attempt to treat the customer as a human being, rather than just a problem. Using social customer service, you can more easily create a relationship with the customer, in turn doing two things: it defuses highly emotional customers – people are less apt to yell at someone they know than at a stranger – and it can create greater customer satisfaction – even if the customer problem isn’t resolved. Finally, social customer service can be a gold mine of product and feature information. You can easily get information about what your product should do, directly from your customers.
BP: For companies that aren’t already doing it, why should they get involved in social media monitoring and response?
ME: Customer service is not often thought of as much more than just answering the phones, responding to emails, and keeping cranky customers from defecting to competitors. By monitoring social media, customer service can become proactive – agents can help the company spot growing trends of customer satisfaction before it becomes too late. When you engage with customers via social media, your customers will speak to you differently than they do when they’re irritated at a long wait in the phone queue. When you speak with them in real time, at the point at which they’ve expressed a problem, you can easily nip a problem in the bud.
[Mike provides a detailed example, available in the full recorded webinar on the Bright Pattern website.]
BP: In your book, you mention a study by the corporate executive board. Can you tell us about that?
ME: Sure. The Corporate Executive Board did some research on customer support. They found that failing to respond to a customer within a promised time period hurts their satisfaction far more than simply making a less-ambitious, and probably more-realistic, promise.
This reveals a general feeling about customer support that is not very positive, but is widespread: Support is just trying to get you off the phone and will tell you lies to do so.
You can’t always deliver the kind of prompt solution that customers would prefer. But the study found its way worse to overpromise and underdeliver.
BP: What do you see B2B companies doing with social media?
ME: Many B2B companies are waking up to the fact that social media is not just for B2C companies. They’re using it to sell – the focus of our book. They’re also using it for customer service. They’re using it to get valuable feedback for product development. And, they are using it to cultivate evangelists for their brands.
BP: What issues should companies look at if they want to re-vamp their contact center to include social media?
ME: Well, first of all, you need to get social-aware tools for your customer service people. You need to be confident enough to let your reps spend longer with callers to really solve their problems rather than spouting scripts. You need to train customer reps to really find out what your customers think. Every encounter could be a product test panel. You should establish a problem-solving community and invite customers and prospects to share their experience. You may find they’ll solve each other’s problems as well.
But most of all, you need to listen by all possible means, and that means enabling your reps to listen in real-time to what people are saying about your products, your company, and your industry.
Bright Pattern provides next-generation cloud contact center software. ServicePattern™ includes native multichannel support to improve customer experience, and scales like no other offering on the market, to 5,000 agents and above. www.BrightPattern.com