Five IT Considerations for Social Media in the Contact Center

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1 White Paper Five IT Considerations for Social Media in the Contact Center Contents Introduction....2 Five IT Considerations....2 Consideration #1 What it means to be a Customer....2 Consideration #2 Making Social Media fit with Everything Else Consideration #3 Monitoring and Analytics Applications Consideration #4 the Relationship between Marketing and the Contact Center Consideration #5 Brand Management Conclusion....9 About Ziff Davis B2B Ziff Davis B2B is a leading provider of research to technology buyers and high-quality leads to IT vendors. As part of the Ziff Davis family, Ziff Davis B2B has access to over 50 million in-market technology buyers every month and supports the company s core mission of enabling technology buyers to make more informed business decisions. Contact Ziff Davis B2B 100 California Street, 4th Fl., San Francisco, CA Tel: Fax: b2bsales@ziffdavis.com Copyright 2012 Ziff Davis B2B. All rights reserved.

2 Introduction Social media is quickly becoming a logical extension to how contact centers have been evolving as businesses transition from legacy to IP-based technologies. This would have started with VoIP, which helped lower telephony costs for contact centers, a provided a richer feature set. Building on this, contact centers have started deploying Unified Communications, which integrates VoIP with other modes used by agents. VoIP becomes more effective this way, as agents now have a full range of real time options to interact with customers. Once contact center develop a comfort level with UC, adding social media is the next step for getting even closer to the customer. Social media s exploding popularity brings disruption wherever it turns up, and the contact center is one of the more recent destinations. While not a traditional channel for dealing with customers, social media cannot be ignored, especially with unhappy customers. In this regard, social media is a defensive tool that contact centers must, at minimum, keep on top of. However, social media can also be used by the contact center in more positive ways, especially to drive brand advocacy. This guide has been prepared to help businesses understand the nature of social media, along with the IT implications to support it in the contact center. Businesses can certainly choose to deploy social media at the own pace, as well as extent, but whatever path is taken, IT considerations will play a central role. Five considerations are reviewed in this guide, and while not every one of these is technical, IT will need to take them all into account to have success with social media in the contact center. Five IT Considerations Consideration #1 What it means to be a Customer Before IT issues can be addressed, you must first consider how technology and social media in particular is impacting the very essence of being customer. This applies equally well to contact center agents, and to have success with social media in your business, you must understand its impact on both sides of the equation. Let s start first with your customers, since everything flows from there. If you are in a professional services business, you don t have customers you have clients. If you think this is simply a difference of semantics, then a Marketing 101 primer is in order. The main distinction, of course, is that you have personal relationships with clients you actually know something about them. Customers are generally anonymous, and you really only know about them in aggregate, based on market research metrics. Naturally, the bigger your customer base, the less likely you ll be able to treat them as clients, so you have to find a happy medium. This is actually determined more by your company culture than technology. Companies that are truly customer-centric find ziffdavis.com 2 of 9

3 ways to do this with or without technology. When this is core to your business values, technology just helps you be more customer-centric. Businesses that fit this mold were customer-centric before the Internet came along nothing beats the personal touch, whether meeting face-to-face or talking on the phone. Social media is really just another checkpoint along the spectrum transitioning from analog telephony to digital, IP-based communication, so it s not the first opportunity to reinvent the buyer-seller relationship. However, it might very well be the first one for you, and if so, you really need to pay attention. Before social media, contact centers have certainly been using other tools to get closer to customers and develop more personal relationships. To explore those further, please download the recentlypublished Ziff Davis guide, Five IT Considerations for UC in the Contact Center. What makes social media different is the ability for customers to control the conversation. Not only can they dictate the dialog, but also the audience for this conversation. Social media can be another mode for interactive dialog with your agents, but it can also be a one-way discourse. The latter could take the form of comments left on your Facebook page, but these same comments or worse could be posted elsewhere, in social media settings far beyond your reach and control. Of course, customers are free to behave this way when saying good things about you. The main point is that customers now have new options new channels, really to voice their views via social media, and this can be very empowering. Just like the Internet itself, social media democratizes public discourse, where low value customers can be heard just as loudly as high value customers. Businesses cannot afford to be impersonal, as you never know how customers will respond. While it s highly unlikely you ll take this to the extreme and form close bonds with all your customers, you must at least start thinking about how to personalize all your touch points with them. This takes us to the contact center, which for some businesses will account for the vast majority of these touch points. Once you adopt the notion that social media gives customers a new voice, it follows that the buyer-seller relationship must change. Unified Communications provides a host of ways to personalize interactions between agents and customers, and social media simply amplifies the need. This is true not just because customers control the conversation, but also because of its immediacy. More than anything that s come before, social media lives in the moment, and to use it effectively, contact centers must be agile. Response times and problem resolutions will need to be faster, and this is where IT s job really begins with social media. ziffdavis.com 3 of 9

4 Consideration #2 Making Social Media fit with Everything Else To do that job well, IT must first recognize the nature of social media. It s one thing to understand how social media empowers customers and by extension, impacts how the contact center must support them. However, social media itself is a distinct, disruptive mode of communication. If you think back to when VoIP came into use, it was very different from legacy telephony, but really only for IT or network operators. For end users, VoIP was pretty transparent in terms of using it, with the only difference of note being 10 digit dialing no need to dial 1 to make a long distance call. In a business setting, VoIP is even more transparent since end users aren t paying for the service, so the cost savings don t resonate with them. Sure, there are quality and reliability issues with VoIP, but this is more IT s problem than for end users. The point here is that not much really changes among end users with VoIP, and many callers don t even know they are using it. Compare that to IT, for whom VoIP can be quite disruptive, especially if their comfort level with legacy telecom is high. VoIP represents an entirely different model of telephony, and can transform the company s mindset about communications altogether. Not only does VoIP have value as a standalone service, but it has even more value when integrated with other modes something that simply wasn t possible with legacy telephony There are numerous parallels between the onset of VoIP and that of social media. The more IT understands the nature of social media, the better able the business will be to benefit from it. Like VoIP, social media is new and different both have some value in replicating existing technologies, but can be disruptive and even transformative when applied in new ways Social media wasn t invented to help companies get closer to their customers, but it has become a perfect tool for that purpose. The challenge, however, is the disruption that comes from empowering customers to speak their mind about your business on their own terms. This is compounded by the fact that social media is both unfiltered and unstructured two concepts that are not compatible with how contact centers typically manage information from customer interactions For contact centers with legacy, telecom-centric operations, this type of information does not readily fit in with the other tools that are well-established. Contact centers focus on data points that are easily measured and tied to existing processes that drive customer outcomes and assess each agent s performance. Social media comes from a very different place, and often finds its way to the contact center on an unsolicited basis. This puts the contact center into a reactive mode, as they don t always know how to respond, and these incursions often demand immediate attention. ziffdavis.com 4 of 9

5 In this regard, unstructured, unfiltered communication flows can be very disruptive, but only for the agent. For social media-aware customers, this is just a normal activity, and there s nothing disruptive about this for them. This is another VoIP parallel in that social media is transparent for the customer, but they have no idea what goes on at the other end. This leads to the central question for Consideration #2 should you treat social media separately from everything else, or try to integrate it with voice, text, IM, video, , etc.? The more you understand the nature of social media, the better able you ll be to make that decision. You may not view social media as a legitimate channel for the contact center, but customers are increasingly thinking otherwise, and at some point, you will have to decide where it fits in your overall solution set. The issue is no different with VoIP you can choose to use it as a standalone telephony solution, or integrate it with Unified Communications for a holistic solution covering all modes for communicating. Consideration #3 Monitoring and Analytics Applications Among the five considerations discussed herein, this is the most IT-centric and by far the most complex. The previous consideration addressed the challenge of trying to fit social media in your existing contact center solution, but the focus here shifts to the types of applications you actually need to manage social media. There really are two types, and this guide serves only to explain them at a high level. A more detailed analysis of the business value and vendor landscape warrants a guide of its own, and pending demand from our readers, this may be coming soon. The first type of application monitors social media activity about your company or brand capturing relevant conversations based on keywords or phrases defined by the business. Since a great deal of this activity occurs during interactions with your contact center, many vendors now offer monitoring applications that are integrated with their contact center solutions. Leading examples include SocialMiner from Cisco, Social Media Manager from Avaya, and OpenScape Fusion Social Media Integrations from Siemens. These are generally enterprise-class applications, where the scale of operations can justify the investment. Perhaps more importantly, these integrated solutions make it easy for supervisors to monitor this activity in the context of how their agents are performing, especially in their use of social media. These solutions may not be an ideal fit for SMBs, and other options exist. Whereas the above examples are vertical developed specifically for the contact center others are horizontal, and can be applied to any situation. This is an emerging field, and examples to consider are Radian6, Attensity360, Sysomos and General Sentiment. Offerings like these may not be ideal for the contact center, and really fall ziffdavis.com 5 of 9

6 into the social CRM space, which takes us into a different topic altogether. These are being mentioned here to illustrate how amorphous the monitoring applications sector is, and IT decision makers must proceed with care. The second application area is advanced analytics, which is even more complex. This brings us into the orbit of Big Data, and is well beyond our scope here. However, for contact centers to embrace social media, some level of capability will be required. Advanced analytics picks up where passive monitoring drops off. Some businesses may only care about keeping a scorecard about their social media standing, but so much more can be done. A key challenge with social media is its unstructured nature, so a first order use of advanced analytics is to transform these streams into usable data that can be integrated with other applications. This involves capabilities such as speech recognition, contextual analysis and data mining, which links mentions to customer databases from which emerging trends can be identified before rather than after the fact. These can enhance the value of your contact center by providing aggregate intelligence for the business. Given the immediacy of social media, analytics can provide early warning for new problems, as well as improve processes by triggering actions along your supply chain faster than you could before. To varying degrees, contact center monitoring applications incorporate some of these elements, but the most sophisticated analytics solutions are standalone offerings. Leading examples that are focused on the contact center include TAKMI from IBM, RightNow CX from Oracle, and VIM9 from Exony. These may not be ideal for SMBs, but in time, scaled down contact center analytics solutions will inevitably come to market. Consideration #4 the Relationship between Marketing and the Contact Center This is a key consideration not just for technology decisions around social media, but also for how it s managed. Every business will have a different dynamic between these two functions, and prior to social media, there may have been little need to work together. In this regard, there are two distinct aspects to social media. One is proactive, where the contact center actively uses it to engage with customers and even do direct outreach when time is of the essence. The other is reactive, where customers use social media to either request customer service, or comment in such as a way that a direct agent response is appropriate. The challenge comes when Marketing operates in isolation from the contact center. Increasingly, social media is part of sales and/or marketing campaigns sometimes these specifically target customers, but other times they will serve a broader ziffdavis.com 6 of 9

7 audience. Regardless, this typically leads to an increase in contact center activity, and if this is not expected, social media will be disruptive in a few ways. Contact centers have well established rules and processes for prioritizing and routing calls, often developed carefully over time. With the right forecasting tools, they have a pretty good idea of call flow patterns, which is a key determinant for staffing levels. Since labor is the contact center s biggest cost factor, this capability is critical, and to keep on budget, unsolicited traffic is not always welcome. This ties in to the earlier issue of the unstructured nature of social media. Marketing and the contact center operate under different performance metrics, usually driven by different priorities and business objectives. For example, say Marketing adds a social media component to a new product launch. Their success metrics will likely include indicators of social media traction number of likes, followers, influencers, etc. These numbers are not relevant to the contact center, which lives and dies by KPIs such as AHT (average handle time), FCR (first call resolution) or TTA (time to answer). Coming back to Marketing, let s say that their launch campaign also triggers comments, questions, complaints, etc. about an earlier version of the product. Marketing isn t particularly interested in these, so they get passed on to the contact center. This creates the unsolicited traffic mentioned previously. While the contact center did not have a hand in creating this activity, the task falls to them to handle the queries. Not only is it incumbent on the contact center to do this, but they may well get internal pressure from Marketing to make these a top priority so as to not undermine their campaign. In this case, social media has brought conflicting objectives into play, and without a coordinated plan, much can go wrong quickly. Not only may the contact center be cajoled into handling this traffic ahead of normal call flows, but they may lack the capability to process this unstructured information. Contact centers tend to be very efficient at managing the traffic they expect and understand, but social media is different, and could be very disruptive. Not only does the supervisor need to determine which agents are best able to handle social media, but also how to capture it in their call logs and customer databases. Initially, this will hurt overall productivity and possibly customer satisfaction scores, where the contact center bears all the downside and Marketing continues business as usual. Many other scenarios are possible, but this should suffice to illustrate the need for these departments to work together when using social media. Clearly, the contact center will make better technology decisions when these joint needs are taken into account. ziffdavis.com 7 of 9

8 Consideration #5 Brand Management Continuing on the Marketing theme, social media is as much about brand management as being a channel for contact centers to engage with customers on their terms. This actually applies on two levels, and both are good reasons for IT to plan thoughtfully around how to handle social media. First, even if you don t use social media in the contact center, some or many of your customers will use it to sound off on their experiences with you. Negative contact center outcomes are the biggest risk, and even if a customer has had a good history dealing with your contact, one bad experience can go viral in a hurry. Of course, you can turn things around by getting happy customers to share their positive contact center experiences via social media, and this is the flip side of the brand management coin. Social media is for everyone, but it takes more effort to turn these good news stories into fodder for the digital masses. This typically falls under the umbrella of brand advocacy, which is well outside the mandate of any contact center. However, you are the keeper of these good tidings, so the contact center definitely has a role to play. Again, this brings Marketing into the picture, as they really own brand management. This information is of great value to them, and the overall interests of the business are best served by having these operations work closely together. Social media content has a short shelf life, and if positive messages get lost or buried in the everyday contact center milieu, they will be of little help to Marketing. To address this, IT needs to invest in databases and analytics tools that can easily be shared across these groups. Not only that, but they must have enough intelligence to accurately identify phrases, keywords, language, grammar, etc. that characterize positive sentiments about your products or company. This is very much an emerging discipline, but will have great value to companies looking to take full advantage of social media. There is a second level to consider with social media and brand management. This relates to cases where the contact center is using social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to engage directly with customers. Rather than monitoring what customers are saying about you on social media (this applies to non-customers just as well), social media can be used as a channel to deliver customer service. While this can be useful in terms of providing service on the customer s terms, social media tools are generally not integrated with the existing contact center platform. Not only does this create problems for data capture to measure performance, but supervisors have little visibility into the flow of communication. Social media is a public forum that is meant to be shared with a broader community. Contact center agents must be very careful in what they say and how they conduct themselves in these settings. Your company or brand image can be hurt by a conversation that ziffdavis.com 8 of 9

9 spirals out of control or even gets muddled by sloppy typing, grammar, language, etc. These scenarios may sound overstated, but you need to keep in mind that customers using social media will generally be more savvy than your agents, and small missteps can be easily amplified. In this regard, agents need to understand the importance of safeguarding your brand in every form of customer contact, especially when using social media. No doubt, agents will need to be better trained here, and supervisors will have to consider this skill set when planning overall staffing needs. From an IT perspective, there is another approach to consider. Many businesses have a customer care website or portal that can provide a rich set of interactive tools to engage customers. These sites could easily incorporate the modes used with social media, namely chat, posting images and even voice. By doing so, agents would have a more controlled environment to mitigate the risks from customer discourse in an open setting. One approach would be to steer customers there once a social media-based session has started, under the pretense that the experience will be better (and it should be). Another would be to make this portal easy to find for customers, and promote it as the fast track way to get in touch with an agent. Either way, the main idea is to limit exposure to real time social media sessions, where the potential to damage your brand is highest. Conclusion This analysis does not address every possible consideration, but these five cover the core groundwork that any situation will require for social media. As noted, technology is only part of the foundation, and IT must have a broader context to understand the value social media can bring. First and foremost, social media is disruptive, and IT cannot afford to view it simply as another new technology. Given its ability to quickly impact behavior, social media must be managed not just as a communications application, but also in how it impacts businesses processes and customer-facing outcomes. As such, IT will have limited success with social media if viewed only through a technology lens. The contact center presents a unique opportunity for social media to create new forms value, especially around customer engagement and brand management. This can only happen, however, if IT understands the nature of social media and how it interworks with the tools already used by your agents. By ignoring social media, the business takes a step backwards in building bridges with customers. Social media will certainly invite negative sentiment, but there will be positive outcomes as well, and overall, we see this being a better plan for businesses that want to be more customer-centric. This guide serves as an entry point for the latter path, and for ongoing analysis, you can supplement your learning by reading related articles on our VoIP News portal. ziffdavis.com 9 of 9