Integrating social media into CRM for next generation CX

Integrating social media into CRM for next generation customer experience Telcos need to rethink their customer care strategies with social media in mind Written by: Adaora Okeleke and Shagun Bali Published May 2014 Ovum Integrating social media into CRM for next generation CX WWW.OVUM.COM

CATALYST The rise of new communication channels such as social media platforms has increased customer contact points and created a huge increase in the volume of customer-related data. To date, telcos are struggling to integrate data from customer touch-points with their CRM solutions, often missing key opportunities to analyze and improve on the customer experience. Compounding the problem is that telcos social media teams work in silos and hence are unable to coordinate with customer service or marketing teams. Understanding social media strategy trends and priorities in the industry will help telcos to benchmark themselves against their peers. This report provides insights into current social media trends and best practices for telcos as they seek to provide care across the social media channel. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The proliferation and exponential increase in usage and reach of social media platforms over the past few years has left telcos in a situation where they need to reconsider their approach to handling social media communications. Though large telcos claim to have strong social media strategies in place, simply monitoring and listening to social media conversations isn t enough. It is critical that telcos are able to identity customers, engage with them, understand customer sentiment, and then leverage these insights to deliver value back to the consumers through personalized responses. Currently, like many other industries, telcos do not have the right capabilities to embrace the social media revolution. Social media as a customer service channel is still at a nascent stage. Telcos are learning lessons from their first attempts to treat it as an interaction channel. The need to offer customers a service channel via social media will persist and grow, and telcos need to develop more sophisticated and strategic mechanisms to cope with the high volume of interactions and ensure quality. As a part of the research process Ovum surveyed 100 telcos senior executives globally. The findings of the survey validate the assertion that telcos consider social media management and monitoring to have positive impact on customer experience. Ovum recommends that telcos need to bridge the gap between various customer data silos to create streamlined processes for delivering care, develop defined social media strategies and teams, and invest in social media management and monitoring tools. Telcos that are operationally efficient, differentiated, and can demonstrate that they understand their customers through personalized services will succeed in the long run. KEY MESSAGES Globally, telcos consider social media as an extremely important channel to provide customer service. However, telcos lack the capabilities to exploit the data and insights they hold about their customer interactions on social media platforms. To date telcos are using social media as a source to drive revenue, through marketing offers, rather than to provide customer care. As a result, a majority of telcos have social media as a part of their marketing department and not their customer service department. Telcos need to break down the silos and link social media identity to leverage customer insights in order to provide personalized services. Furthermore, deploying social media management tools does hold potential for telcos to enhance customer service through personalized services, reduce costs with low call volumes and gain operational efficiency through consolidating customer interactions. Though it is operationally difficult to answer all customer queries and service complaints through social media tools, telcos need to strike a smart balance between delivering care across channels without hampering customer experience levels. Ovum. Page 2

SURGE IN CUSTOMERS UPTAKE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Growth in social media interactions with telcos Across industries, the use of social media as a customer engagement tool has grown over the last few years. Social media, which was initially set up as a tool to enable interactions between family and friends has now extended to include interactions with service providers such as telcos. Customers can exercise the power to openly praise, question or criticize services offered to them by service providers. Managing communications with customers on social media platforms requires telcos to gain deeper insights and understanding of who the customer is and what their needs are. The distinct attributes of social media such as bi-directional communications, immediacy that customer response demands, and the extended real-time reach to customers; have forced telcos to transform their outdated customer service strategies. As communications on social media are shared with the user s social community, interactions become viral and can impact a larger audience. Any wrong post or tweet could lead to a larger damage. As a result, service providers need to seriously revisit how they respond to queries from customers with a view to ensuring that they meet the needs of customers via social media. For years customers have considered telcos to be providing poor customer service. However, with the competition for customers fiercer than ever before, telcos need to provide superior customer service than before in order to retain the customers they currently have. Social media platforms and smartphone ubiquity have shifted the balance of power in the relationship between a telco and its customers and placed customers in the driver's seat. Telco customers now use a plethora of social media channels available to them to contact the telco with service requests or inquiries. Social media has transformed the concept of customer service. Telco customers use social media to voice their opinions throughout the presales and onboarding stages and during the lifetime of their product or service. Furthermore, customers expect a timely and personalized response that addresses their concern. As a result, it is important for telcos to listen and respond instantly to their customers on social media by using monitoring and engagement tools. It is however extremely challenging to manage customer expectations and provide prompt responses, especially in light of the complexity and expansion of telcos' products and service offerings over the last decade. Though handling social media interactions poses many challenges, social media provides a new real time platform for the delivery of care to customers across geographical regions. This is unlike other channels like voice and SMS. By expressing their opinions, customers provide telcos with new and rich sources of data and insight which telcos can draw on to provide better services. It supports the delivery of personalized service offerings as well as a means for gauging the brand perception. SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE TRENDS IN THE TELECOM INDUSTRY Social media is now a priority for telcos Telcos have realized the importance of social media as a customer support channel. They have added response capabilities and now engage with customers through social for delivering service and also offering marketing campaigns. Figure 1 highlights that 87% of surveyed telcos consider social media important to their delivery of care. This data indicates a significant shift in the way in which telcos now view social media as part of their channels to deliver care. Ovum. Page 3

Figure 1: Relevance of social media channel in delivery of care In addition, Figure 2 shows that 33% of respondents indicated that they record a monthly average of more than 10,000 customer enquiries via social media with the European based telcos receiving a higher proportion of these enquires. As customers constantly look for ways to obtain quick answers and explore more self-service options, the number of users that choose to reach out to telcos via social media is only going to increase in future. Figure 2: Monthly average number of visits to telco social media sites Facebook and Twitter remain the most used platforms Figure 3 shows how telcos responded when asked which social media tools they support. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Twitter are the most frequently used, with 91% of the surveyed telcos currently using Facebook and 90% using Twitter for social media interactions. These platforms offer the most options for customers to connect directly with an organization through public or private chat sessions. Facebook and Twitter are the most widely supported because of their high user base and ease of use. Customers can ask questions to peers as well as send questions and feedback to telcos via wall posts or private messages. Ovum. Page 4

In addition, 41% of telcos are also leveraging YouTube to educate their customers. This does not come as a surprise, since customers are more eager to look for answers themselves than wait for a response from a telco through the traditional delivery channel such as email, chat, contact center or retail store. Telcos can upload videos on YouTube to educate customers on various issues including devise issues, how to view their bill, how to change their billing plans. Telcos like Vodafone use YouTube to host step-by-step self-help videos on common customer queries. Topics covered include how to insert a SIM card and other related issues and phone and application related problems. The company also leverages the same platform for marketing new services such as its new 4G services. Customers could refer to these videos when in need of information if telcos can provide more answers to customers via social media channels, this will help to deflect calls from the call center and invariably reduce costs. Figure 3: Social media platforms used by telcos Google+ and YouTube also emerging as key investment area Respondents were also asked which platforms they plan to invest in the coming three years. Though Facebook and twitter remained the top investment priorities for telcos, 33% of surveyed telcos also highlighted Google+ as an area of investment going forward (Figure 4). Ovum. Page 5

Figure 4: Investments in social media platforms Customers use social media channels to seek information on products and services Figure 5 highlights the top care-related queries that telcos receive via social media. 77% of surveyed telcos said that customers reach out to telcos via social media channels to seek information on products and services; another 75% of telcos responded that customers use social media platforms to complain about service outages. Figure 5: Top reasons why customers use social media Ovum. Page 6

Internal teams within the marketing department are responsible for social media strategies Figures 5 shows 43% of surveyed telcos have social media team as a part of their marketing departments. This trend highlights that to date; telcos are using social media platforms more as a marketing tool rather than a customer channel to deliver care. Only one in three have customer care team responding to care related inquiries, explaining why care interactions across social media result in a call to the contact center. However, although majority of respondents have internal teams within marketing and customer care handling the social media interaction, there is a rising trend of outsourcing social media operations to third parties. Outsourcing of social media interactions is likely to emerge as a growing trend among telcos as many do not have the resources (nor the expertise) to handle full-blown customer service engagements on these channels. As a result, telcos will turn to outsourcers to help craft and execute their strategies. Figure 6: Responsibility of social media strategy within the organisation A majority of telcos already have social media presence and fully understand the business benefits they can realize with effective social media strategies. However, they currently use social media to push marketing offers or to gauge macro-level trends in customer sentiments. Simply monitoring and listening to social media conversations isn t enough. It is critical that telcos are able to identity customers, engage with them, understand customer sentiment, and then integrate social media interactions. TYING SOCIAL MEDIA TO THE OVERALL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MESSAGE IS A CHALLENGE Globally, telcos are clearly on-board to leverage social media platforms as customer service tools, but they face challenges that hinder the efficient deployment of social media monitoring and management tools to support social media strategies. Some of the key challenges that telcos deal with are detailed below. Struggle with siloed approach For years, telcos have managed their businesses in a departmentalized fashion. Various business functions such as marketing, CRM, billing and provisioning work as silos. Their IT systems are also developed in silos Ovum. Page 7

restricting the seamless exchange of customer data among business processes. Telcos continue to engage with customers through a functional rather than personal approach. Organizational silos make end-to-end processes difficult and result in poor performance and inefficiencies. These barriers have made it impossible for telcos to get a 360 degree view of customer interactions and experiences. The ability to link social media interactions back to existing customer records and support queries from other channels is a critical issue for telcos. Telcos are unable to provide specific answers as their social media teams lack the capabilities to identity and respond to customers queries on the social media platforms. Customers want to expend minimal effort in finding answers to their questions. As a result the customers ultimately need to connect to live agents to get specific answers. Agents need context in order to resolve these customer queries. However, with customer information residing in silos, it defeats the purpose of having social media teams in place since their activities add to the telco s costs, and also negatively impacts customer experience. When customers are well-informed and communication-savvy, the channel-by-channel approach is not enough. Telcos lack a broader picture of customers and their needs as they move across channels. Previously telcos could afford such disjointed organizational structures, but in recent years the situation has changed dramatically, now a range of new external forces are shaping the industry. Telcos with a siloed approach to social media strategies are at risk of losing customers to more agile and potentially new competitors. Telcos need a multichannel strategy that offers consumers a seamless experience across all touchpoints to create value for customers. Lack of trained personnel Telco operations have grown extremely complex over the last decade with bundled offers, sophisticated devices and flexible billing plans. This implies that customer queries are more complex than ever and difficult for any customer support representative (CSR) to handle independently. Figure 4 shows 74% of surveyed telcos consider lack of appropriate staffing skills to be a key challenge. It is difficult to find trained agents that understand social media and also have good customer service skills. Telcos require agents that can respond quickly with personalized comments, resolve issues, but also company to policy and privacy concerns. In addition, a large number of respondents also highlighted budget constraints and system integration issues to be hampering investments in social media technologies. For past three years the telecom industry s IT budgets have been flat, and telcos are struggling to pull resources from ongoing projects to invest in social media technology and personnel. With declining revenues on one hand and increasing customer expectations on the other, telcos need to get more with less. They require tools that can integrate well with their legacy solutions with minimum system integration costs as well. They also need tools for call center agents, so that agents can respond quickly to care related inquiries across social media to provide the same consistent experience that is provided in a traditional call center. Ovum. Page 8

Figure 7: Key challenges telcos face in deploying social media technology Manage privacy issues Telcos are highly regulated and need to make sure that customer privacy and identity details are secure on social media. Telcos social media teams need to strike a balance with each interaction on solving the customer query while also protecting private information. Strong privacy considerations also restrict telcos from engaging extensively via social media channels. Absence of a defined approach Although most telcos today are engaging with customers on social media, they lack a clear direction and a robust strategy to deliver value to their customers through social media channels. Although they have invested in social listening and marketing, many are unsure how to leverage social media alongside traditional support communications. Within any typical telco, marketing and customer service departments are not necessarily in sync. The urgency to respond to social media is both enticing and frightening depending on where in the organization the social media team sits. Telcos have not been able to knit the of customer touchpoints together for a holistic strategy to manage customer interactions. There need to be proper workflows to integrate social media as an important aspect to communication. As social customer service gains traction, telcos are being forced into rethinking the way they approach both the monitoring and management of their social media interactions, and the way they orchestrate and manage endto-end processes. NEXT STEPS FOR TELCOS TO PROVIDE CARE VIA SOCIAL MEDIA Telcos need to re-examine their business processes with social in mind. The siloed approach to supporting customer enquiries will need to be re-considered as its negative effect becomes emphasized when interacting with customers via social media. Investments need to be made in staffing, tools for social monitoring and engagement, and storage systems. Hiring or training staff and providing them with the right tools to engage effectively with customers on social is a necessity. Data storage systems that store all interactions made with Ovum. Page 9

customers are of utmost importance to ensure that the telco is able to deliver a personalized and optimized experience to customers. Social media analytics will equip CSRs with automated systems that ensure the delivery of prompt response to customer s enquiries. Internal processes will need to be reviewed to reflect a clear understanding of the dynamics that social media brings to telcos. Telcos need to develop business processes and best practices to engage via social media Telcos need to re-evaluate, and in some cases evolve, their business processes to meet the demands of social media. It should be a last resort for telcos to re-direct customers to another page. For example, on Facebook, telcos can try to resolve all customer-related problems using Facebook s built-in messaging and chat systems. However, interactions that require the transfer of confidential information such as credit card details require a secure platform, so it is inevitable that agents will need to redirect customers. The combined social and CRM data of customers enable telcos to gain a better view of the customer and provide feedback within the same social media environment. Telcos need to define specific targets for resolving customer enquiries, and should aim to resolve enquiries at the first point of contact, though first contact resolution may not be achievable in some cases. It is important that problems are resolved following clearly defined procedures. This will improve customer perception of the telco s brand among customers and their social networks. In addition, telcos will need to identify and specify key customer engagement metrics that need to be monitored to identify how effectively the telcos are supporting clients via social media. Ensure that social media does not become another silo Telcos must ensure that their social care processes and technologies do not operate in silos. Social CRM data and interactions need to be integrated back into the customer s account to gain a more balanced and holistic picture of who the customer is and the telco s history over time with the customer. Telcos will need to rigorously examine their existing platforms to determine if they are fit for purpose and capable of supporting social tools and technologies. If they are not, the telcos need to change workflow of business processes to seamlessly manage customer interactions across, ideally, all channels (retail, contact center, online, social, and mobile). In the age of multi-channel interactions, it is necessary that service providers not only provide a consistent experience across all channels and touch points, but also ensure that the interaction is persistent as customers hop across channels. This means that all forms of social interactions with customers such as social media sales and service-related activities also need to be connected to a more tangible channel, for example to close a sale (when a customer is signing up for a product or service). Invest in dedicated resources for social media engagements The social media channel requires customer support representative with additional tools and set of skills to those required by a regular call center. For example, these social media platforms use different methods of communication: YouTube uses videos, Flickr uses pictures, and Twitter uses succinct statements with a limit of 140 characters. CSRs need to have a flair for engaging with customers on a social basis, identifying with the customer's social persona and being able to hold a social discussion irrespective of who the customer is. CSRs also need to react promptly to negative comments on social media before they become viral. It is important to understand a customer s problem and aim to resolve it either at the first point of contact or by liaising with subject matter experts. To achieve this, CSRs need enough knowledge about the business to route customer enquiries quickly to the right subject-matter experts. The social media channel demands a quick response time, so CSRs need to be proactive in dealing with customer enquiries. However, first call resolution may not be a necessary condition of good customer service, so long as the agent maintains a commitment to solve the customer s problem. Monitoring and engagement technology is required to cope with the volume of social media activities Ovum. Page 10

Telcos will need to invest in social media analytics tools such as monitoring and engagement tools. These tools provide better and more precise identification of relevant interactions. Monitoring tools identify and extract relevant messages from customer interactions such as tweets on social media. These customer interactions then have to be moved away from the social sphere into the relevant customer support channel for the prompt handling of the customers enquiries. All of these activities need to be performed as quickly as possible to ensure that customer problems are resolved as quickly as possible. Telcos need to store the data from the social media interactions 93% of telcos interviewed during our survey indicated that they either cannot identity customers using their social media profiles or can only identify customers when they contact the call centres. However, 36% of our respondents indicated that they store all social media interactions within their CRM database (Figure 8). Telcos need to be able to match all interactions made with customers over social media with the customers social media profiles. This is important as it will help in enhancing the overall knowledge of who the customer is and support the delivery of improved experience to the customer. Figure 8: Storing identities and interactions via social media within CRM The content generated from social media communications creates a rich source of information that both telcos and customers can rely on. For the telco, it provides insights into the common problems which customers raise. These insights will be relevant to the telcos support team handling these customer enquiries. A pool of answers to these common customer enquiries can then be made available to both customer service agents and customers as well. Data drawn from the analysis of these interactions could support operational activities that support the maintenance of the network. For example, network planning and optimization teams can leverage the data drawn from social media interactions to localize problems and allocate resources in a more precise manner. LEVERAGING SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS HOLDS POTENTIAL FOR TELCOS TO INCREASE REVENUES, REDUCE COST AND GAIN EFFICIENCIES Delivering an enhanced and personalized customer experience Ovum. Page 11

Figure 9 highlights that 86% of telcos consider that investment in social media with respect to social monitoring and management tools will facilitate the management of customer service and enhance overall customer experience. Figure 9: Need for social media management and monitoring tools The delivery of better customer service on social media could attract other potential customers as exisiting telco customers can either get to talk about it on their social meida pages or recommend the telco to friends based on the level of service recived from the telco. This could lead to better brand image and more sales. With social media, customer support agents could resolve questions quicker. This could help customers cut down on long waiting times as calls could be addressed without having to wait on queues. If executed properly, this solution will provides a fast, and precise way of resolving customer enquiries as well as reduce the customer call rates and time spent resolving queries at contact centers which results in lower costs to the telco. Figure 10 indicates that about 10% of calls to contact centers could have been deflected if resolved via social media. Figure 10: Percentage of contact centers calls due to unresolved queries made via social media Ovum. Page 12

Social media tools support proactive delivery of customer care One benefit of having an integrated social media marketing and customer service strategy is that telcos can proactively reach out to a large number of customers with relevant alerts and information, as well as offers and promotions. Figure 11 highlights that 39% of surveyed telcos said that ability to resolve customer care issues proactively to reduce customer calls is a high priority for them. Figure 11: Business benefits of social media for customer care It makes sense for telcos to be proactive to prevent customer queries and manage issues. For example, telcos can use social media to explain a technical outage and the estimated resolution timeframe. By providing additional information and explaining how they are handling sensitive situations via social media, telcos can potentially deflect calls which can result in huge cost savings for telcos Proactive social media campaigns should therefore be part of an overall cross-channel strategy to alert customers to problem resolution information alongside promotional materials. Being proactive will facilitate telcos enhance the customer experience and also save costs. Improving marketing management with social media management and monitoring tools Among other areas, telcos can also realize significant value in marketing management with social media management and monitoring tools. Social media tools can help marketing managers develop more targeted, highly measurable, and effective social media marketing campaigns. Marketing managers can determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns based on social media buzz, tweets, retweets, and other online chat platforms. The same technologies can also enhance customer careby enabling highly personalized campaigns and ads. Telcos can also use social media management and monitoring tools to gain insight into how customers perceive their key competitors, helping to shape future strategies. Facilitate multichannel integration for a seamless customer care strategy Today s customers expect services to be flexible that enable them to switch between channels of communication. With the right business processes and technologies in place, telcos can seamless exchange Ovum. Page 13

data across each channel and touch point with multichannel integration. Multichannel integration centralizes data from all service channels and facilitates telco to convey consistent and personalized data along with contextual information at each interaction to the customer. For example, when a social media team forwards a customer request (that cannot be answered in a public forum) to a live CSR, the CSRA would not require the customer to repeat their request again. The data from the consolidated customer database will provide the CSR historical data from previous interactions to give a holistic picture of customer experience. The need for multichannel integration is higher for telcos as their portfolios have become complex with triple and quad-play service bundles (combining Internet, television, fixed lines, and mobile lines). They need to make sure they can service the entire portfolio across touchpoints with most contact channels being deployed for both sales and service interactions. With the right social media management and monitoring tools, Telcos' customer experience strategies eventually can evolve to offer multiple channels to their customers, adjusting their channel mix to the customer's communication preferences and striking a smart balance between automation and human interaction. CONCLUSION Social media plays a critical role in the customer s perception of services and customer experience management strategies devised by telcos. The importance of using social media platforms as channel for delivering care will continue to grow. As a result, social media strategies require operational departments including marketing and customer care to be in sync for an integrated and defined approach. Efficiently managing social media interactions and integrating them with other sources of customer data can facilitate telcos to reduce operating costs by consolidating silos of subscriber data, enabling policy-driven service personalization, providing personalized advertising, and simplifying customers' interactions with various service departments. For telcos to successfully manage social media platforms as a customer care delivery channel they need to: Leverage social media as a customer engagement channel versus a listening or marketing channel. Link social identity to subscriber s account to identify customer. Integrate social media interactions and insights to the customer database. Develop standardized customer engagement strategies to maintain consistency across channels. Invest in social media teams, tools, and technologies. Ovum's Knowledge Centers are new premium services offering the entire suite of Ovum information in fully interactive formats. To find out more about Knowledge Centers and our research, contact us: Ovum Europe Mortimer House 37-41 Mortimer Street London W1T 3JH, UK +44 20 7551 9000 crmgroup@ovum.com Ovum Australia Level 5, 459 Little Collins Street Melbourne, VIC 3000 Australia +61 3 9601 6700 Ovum New York 100 Wall Street, 9th Floor New York NY 10004, USA +1 212 686 7400 All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Ovum Europe Limited. Whilst every care is taken to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this material, the facts, estimates and opinions stated are based on information and sources which, while we believe them to be reliable, are not guaranteed. In particular, it should not be relied upon as the sole source of reference in relation to the subject matter. No liability can be accepted by Ovum Europe Limited, its directors or employees for any loss occasioned to any person or entity acting or failing to act as a result of anything contained in or omitted from the content of this material, or our conclusions as stated. The findings are Ovum's current opinions; they are subject to change without notice. Ovum has no obligation to update or amend the research or to let anyone know if our opinions change materially. Ovum. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited This report is a licensed product and is not to be reproduced without prior permission. Ovum. Page 14