INTEGRATING SOCIAL MEDIA INTO THE CONTACT CENTRE

Transcription

1 A Strategy for Large and Medium Sized Business NCE3-GEN

2 CONTENTS Introduction 2 Social media Is it really a problem? 3 Is social media an issue for just the marketing department? 5 Social media may have implications for regulatory compliance 6 How to assess if social media is a threat to your business 6 INTRODUCTION The subject of social media in the contact centre is attracting considerable hype and publicity. Most people can recall a high profile story of a firm suffering devastating reputational damage as a result of a poorly handled social media interaction. What keeps senior managers awake at night is a lack of confidence in the processes and systems they have in place to monitor and manage the potential threat from social media. This paper takes a closer look at the threat and considers how businesses can start to assess the risk from social media. It then outlines a strategy all companies can adopt to help set appropriate investment budgets and timelines. www. in www. A strategy for integrating social media in the contact centre 8 How Netcall can help integrate social media within your contact centre 9 References 10 2

3 SOCIAL MEDIA: IS IT REALLY A PROBLEM? 67% of customers expect same day response Average response times between 6 and 13 hours 45% of firms ignore requests posted on Facebook Social media volumes to increase: 32% CAGR Despite the hype, some commentators forecast that social media will represent just 1.2% of all contact centre interactions in This is expected to see growth of 177% in the three years to 2017 but, even then, social media is unlikely to represent more than 2.5% of all inbound customer interactions. In the grand scheme of things, social media will be fifth in the rank order of all customer interactions by RANK CHANNEL % OF ALL INTERACTIONS CUMULATIVE INTERACTIONS (%) 1 Voice / Telephone Web chat Self-service Social media Letter / Post Others FIGURE 1: EXPECTED RANK ORDER OF CUSTOMER INTERACTION CHANNELS IN 2017 (Based on information from ContactBabel 1 ) Given such forecasts, it may be difficult for many businesses to justify the investment required to integrate social media into the contact centre. However, relying on these forecasts alone ignores the potential risk to the business. If you look at how consumers perceive and use social media, you start to appreciate the potential threat to organisations. Research conducted in the US found that 67% of consumers who use social media to contact a company for customer services reasons, expect a response from the company on the same day. Some 32% expect a response within thirty minutes 2. It s clear that social media users expect a rapid response to their query. Indeed evidence suggests that they select social media because they expect they will get a faster response than if they try or a voice call 4. 3

4 FIGURE 2: CONSUMER EXPECTATIONS REGARDING RESPONSE TIMES TO SOCIAL MEDIA QUERIES (Based on information published by socialhabit.com 2 ) RESPONSE TIMES TO SOCIAL MEDIA QUERIES It s as if consumers expect companies to have a pool of people dedicated to watching social media feeds and being able to respond immediately. Worryingly, the evidence suggests that if they fail to get a response in the timescale they expect, it can trigger further social (i.e. public) comments using language suggesting intolerance and frustration towards the company. Within 3 days 33% On same day 25% Within 30 mins 32% Within 60 mins 10% The scale of the problem becomes evident when you look at the typical response times of contact centres. Research 3 indicates that companies need to close a huge gap between consumer expectations and satisfaction where response times are concerned. SOURCE OF INTERACTION AVERAGE RESPONSE TIMES MINUTES HOURS Voice / Telephone Twitter Facebook FIGURE 3: RESPONSE TIMES TO DIFFERENT CONTACT CENTRE CHANNELS: (Based on information gathered from Our Social Times 3 ) Whilst businesses are relatively well equipped to deal with voice interactions, those from social media appear to be a long way off meeting expectations. If 42% of consumers expect a response in under an hour, they must have a very low opinion of how businesses are embracing social media generally, with responses taking between six to thirteen hours on average. Indeed, during 2013, it appears that only 55% of UK firms responded to customer queries posted on Facebook. However, with social media representing just a small proportion of total customer interactions, do these delays and failures to respond at all, really matter? 4

5 IS SOCIAL MEDIA AN ISSUE FOR JUST THE MARKETING DEPARTMENT? Customers perceive social media as a fast way to contact a business Marketing has limited ability to manage queries Contact centre agents most capable for resolving social media requests In most organisations, it was the marketing department who introduced social media to the business and will have aligned resources to operate the various platforms. At least one person will be publishing blog posts and outbound messages of around 140 characters. In a medium sized business, that person will also be responding to any feedback resulting from that outbound activity. Given this situation, it seems logical to rely on these few members of staff to monitor all other social media interactions that involve the company and its brands. They can deal with any negative responses themselves or forward details to an appropriate expert elsewhere in the business, including the customer services team. It s an understandable approach but, potentially, a risky one. Firstly, it assumes these marketing resources can monitor and engage with social media feeds at least once an hour. For many medium sized companies, the marketing staff are spread too thinly to guarantee this level of cover. It also assumes that the people providing the marketing input for social media are competent at providing customer service management. ALIGN ACTIVITY TO SKILL SETS Brand Mangagement Campaign Responses Outbound Social Media Promotions Marketing Inbound Social Media Interactions Likely to be for customer service reasons Contact Centre In most cases, they will not have been trained as customer service advisors, will not have access to the required CRM tools, and will not be aware of the processes and escalation paths practised by the customer service team. Given the fast response expected by social media users, the interaction needs to be correctly logged, evaluated and prioritised like any other inbound interaction. It s a very risky strategy to allow such an engagement to be passed between departments using just or voic . The potential for that enquiry to get lost or delayed is just too high. It only needs one dissenter to go public about poor customer service for the company to suffer significant reputational damage. Relying on the marketing department to manage customer service via social media may be a false economy. 5

6 SOCIAL MEDIA MAY HAVE IMPLICATIONS FOR REGULATORY COMPLIANCE Social media is becoming mainstream Companies now expected to have some social media coverage Probability that regulatory authorities will treat social media like other communications The adoption of social media by consumers has arguably reached a level of maturity where it can no longer be considered as just a passing fad. For example, any use of social media in the financial services industry in the UK already has to conform to FCA rules around advertising and marketing. The same considerations will apply to other industries required to operate under regulatory and compliance regimes. Most compliance activities warrant some form of customer service capability. In such situations, it could be argued that businesses have a duty of care to have procedures in place to manage customer interactions from social media, in the same way as they do for traditional channels like voice and . Failure to have suitable procedures in place could arguably compromise a company s liability insurance arrangements. That is why all companies should define and adopt an appropriate approach to handling inbound social media interactions. The next section outlines a useful strategy to consider. HOW TO ASSESS IF SOCIAL MEDIA IS A THREAT TO YOUR BUSINESS Adoption of social media varies by industry Prudent for even low-risk companies to monitor social media feeds Just tracking own accounts may miss mentions made elsewhere in social media The strategy you need to adopt for social media customer management will depend upon the risk you perceive. As a rule of thumb, if you have high volumes of customers and sales transactions, your audience is more likely to consider social media as a channel of customer interaction. This typically covers consumer-oriented industries such as retailers, public transport operators, leisure services, consumer goods producers, and so on. If you operate in this type of environment, you will need to ensure you have sophisticated customer engagement processes in place to manage social media. Your planning in this area will no doubt be mature. Your investment plans should be focussed on integrating social media monitoring and engagement seamlessly and cost effectively with other inbound interaction channels. Industries where the volume of customers is relatively low, and contact is managed by dedicated staff, probably face a lower level of risk from social media as of today. Many B2B firms will fall into this category. The need for significant investment is low, and decisions about re-structuring the business to handle social media interactions may not warrant urgent attention. 6

7 However, it would be wrong to assume that these low-risk companies should not be monitoring the threat from social media. At the very minimum, it will be prudent to have a plan documented that defines trigger points for when a specific response to a negative social media interaction needs to be implemented. Consequently, for every large and medium sized business, no matter what industry they are involved in, it makes sense to implement some level of social media monitoring. You will first need to establish a base line of social media activity: outbound versus inbound; the causes, volumes and frequency involved; and the resolutions and consequences arising. This information may be more useful to the marketing department to start with if you are in a low-risk industry. However, such information will instil confidence that you are able to identify trends as they emerge, and be able to switch from a watch-and-see approach to one of active social media customer engagement when the time comes. Just be sure that you use a vendor who can monitor all social media interactions rather than just a sample of the total. RISK POSED BY SOCIAL MEDIA HIGHEST RISK LOWER RISK Examples: Retail Public Transport Leisure Services Consumer Goods Examples: Manufacturing Civil Engineering Consulting B2B Process to manage risk well advanced The risk still exists: Firms need to monitor For example, if you just rely on feeds from your own Twitter account, you may only be seeing 10% of all the Twitter activity. Only a couple of companies across the globe have full access to what is known as the fire hose, i.e. 100% of all activity on Twitter. To ensure effective compliance, find a social media partner who specialises in contact centre solutions and can provide monitoring and analysis based on the fire hose, and not just a small percentage of the overall traffic. This is obviously critical for companies in high risk industries like retail, financial services and consumer goods. However, it also makes sense for firms in lower risk categories to use vendors with access to the fire hose right from the outset too. It avoids the need to switch providers further down the line when social media eventually does become an issue. Having identified the extent of the risk posed by social media, what steps should you put in place to manage that risk? The following section highlights a useful strategy to consider. 7

8 A STRATEGY FOR IN THE CONTACT CENTRE Intelligent monitoring to identify negative posts Important to recognise most influential individuals and groups Prioritise and route negative posts to trained agents Ensure systems can track channel shift Once you have access to all social feeds (e.g. Twitter s fire hose), you then need to identify and filter out those interactions which require engagement, and determine what resources are required to fulfil that engagement. The first step is to deploy a tool that can scan every social media event and identify interactions where your brand is associated with terms like help, assistance, failed or poor service. Such tools will be able to scan for expletives and other negative sentiment too. You will be creating a library of negative keywords and phrases that the tool will use to identify social media posts with a high probability of requiring intervention. You should also strive to use a tool that also looks at the online influence of the person or entity initiating the negative post. Clearly, those with a strong online following may warrant prioritisation in terms of resolution. Apart from online influence, it should be possible to prioritise social media requests according to other criteria relevant to your business needs. That could be by customer name, geographic location, product type and similar terms. Having reached a stage of identifying and prioritising a social media event that requires engagement, the task then becomes one of allocating the event to a relevant agent. The aim is to blend inbound social media interactions into the same stream as other customer interactions. BASIC SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING PROCESS Scan all social media traffic (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Wordpress, Niche/Others) Identify relevant posts Identify negative posts Prioritise by influence & urgency Route to trained agent A good option is to feed social media requests into a universal queue alongside those from voice, and web chat. In this way you can apply skills-based workflows across all inbound channels and so ensure consistency in how every interaction is resolved. 8

9 This approach also allows agents to use the same in-house systems and processes for social media as they use for voice, and web chat. They can have a full 360 degree view of the initiator of the interaction; whether it started out as a social media post or moved on to a web chat before appearing as a voice call. The agent will be able to see the customer s transactional record, as well as what information has been captured at each stage of the dialogue to date. Furthermore, agents should be able to engage with customers without having to navigate between different individual applications and screens. It should not matter what telephony platform you use either. Seek vendors who can be platform agnostic. With a unified queue and interface, everything will run faster and smoother. Queries will be easier to manage and resolve first time, and it will be easier to generate reports. This latter point should not be underestimated. Being able to easily report on interactions from multiple channels makes it easier to identify trends and reorganise resources accordingly. Not only can this act as an early warning indicator regarding weaknesses within the business, but it will also help instil confidence amongst senior managers that the business has all aspects of customer engagement under control, including social media. Your investment decisions should be based on implementing a solution that can meet all the above aspects. HOW NETCALL CAN HELP YOU INTEGRATE SOCIAL MEDIA WITHIN YOUR CONTACT CENTRE Netcall s Liberty Suite provides large and medium sized UK companies with social media monitoring and engagement facilities. It s social media capability is powered by the Sentiment platform. This provides full social media monitoring and analysis. Sentiment has full access to the Twitter fire hose and monitors all the major social media platforms including Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and others. Such capability enables them to provide brand insight and research to enterprises such as Barclays Bank, npower and many other high profile enterprises. This capability is being blended with Netcall s core contact centre solution features such as universal queues, skills-based routing, CRM and other intelligent interaction handling. The total solution can be provided as an on-premise option, via the cloud, or as a hybrid or virtualised deployment. Companies can seamlessly integrate social media within the contact centre at a pace that matches the needs of each business. Using Netcall s Liberty Suite, companies can deliver a comprehensive multichannel customer engagement experience. 9

10 References: 1. ContactBabel, UK Contact Centres in 2014 The State of the Industry Our Social Times, 2013, Social Media Monitoring for Customer Service, published in association with Sentiment 4. Netcall is one of the UK s leading providers of Customer Engagement Solutions. Netcall s product suite delivers compelling solutions for end-to-end customer engagement, incorporating Intelligent Contact Handling, Workforce Optimisation, Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management. Netcall s customer base contains over 700 organisations in both the private and public sectors, including 40% of the UK s top 50 customer service companies, 70% of the NHS Acute Health Trusts, major telecoms operators and leading commercial organisations across many sectors. CONTACT Hamilton House, 111 Marlowes, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP1 1BB t f e enquiries@netcall.com w in NCE3-GEN