5 Smart Social Media Strategies for the Contact Centre

How to tap into a smart social strategy to help you form thriving relationships with your customers by satisfying their thirst for connections.

Social media is a powerful way for companies to connect with consumers. In fact, CFI Group, a customer feedback analysis company, found that adding an effective social media service improves customer satisfaction rates by up to 20 percent! The trouble is it’s tempting to think of just having social channels as enough. Unfortunately, getting up and running with social media is just the first step toward establishing a thriving presence. Once you get set up with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more, you have to actively engage with your friends, fans, and followers in order to be a bona fide social media powerhouse.

Regrettably, most contact centre managers are already maxed out with handling dwindling resources and rising managerial expectations while struggling to provide consistent, quality customer service. Adding Tweets, Likes and Shares to the mix is enough to make your contact centre feel like a house of cards ready to collapse at any moment. To stay vital, you need a smart social strategy to keep your contact centre competitive. Here are five solid social media tactics for your contact centre to keep your company relevant in a multichannel landscape.

1. Right Issue, Right Channel

While customers may prefer being able to manage all of their issues socially, sometimes a particular channel isn’t suited to a particular inquiry. For instance, a 140-character Twitter chat won’t leave you room to solve a complex customer complaint, so funnelling that issue to the telephone call centre may be required. Be sure your agents know the right time to move up the ladder and escalate a social engagement to a telephone call in order to provide the best customer service.

2. No Such Thing as a “Twitter Hold” or “Facebook Queue”

Remember that social channels don’t come with hold music. If you advertise your social media accounts as viable lines of communication for customer service inquiries, you’d best have agents ready to handle social interactions — and fast! Gartner, an IT research and analytics firm, reports that absent or even delayed responses to inquiries via social media channels can result in a consumer churn rate of up to 15 percent. Think of airlines; they have dedicated Twitter accounts for real-time problem solving for travelers communicating flight delays and baggage issues. If you build it, they will come, but you must be ready to respond at the speed of the Internet, which we all know is a good 1000 kph faster than the telephone call centre’s speed of operation.

3. Focus on Training

Everyone thinks they know how to handle social media, but real customer service prowess isn’t for amateurs. If you’re making a concerted effort at social media interaction for your contact centre, be sure you provide ample time and resources to fully train your agents on how to effectively communicate on each network. Be sure there is a clear strategy for social media so that customers get the service they’re looking for whether they call or click.

4. Use Social for Proactive Outbound Communication

Major service outage? Let your customers know before call volume hits astronomical levels from service calls. Use your social channels to be proactive, and let your customers know what to expect. They will appreciate the clear communication. Just like a recorded voice on a holding call that checks in to let customers know how long they can expect to wait, a proactive approach to service issues goes a long way toward soothing sour customers and keeping them calm until everything is back on track.

5. Use Smart Tools

Merely having live social media channels isn’t enough to provide a seamless social service experience for your customers. You’ll need smart technology to help “mine sweep” your social media networks and attend to issues that occur throughout the social space. Consider a smart social media monitoring tool to help you keep track of who’s tweeting what about your brand and put out fires before they become infernos.

So, think you’re ready to go social? Be sure you’re arming your agents with effective tools to provide the same level of quality service you’re achieving on the phone. And neglect your social channels at your peril; negative feedback can go viral on outside social media if you’re providing sub-par service. For more information on how to maximize your social prowess and provide seamless client service in the connected contact centre, consult our free white paper.