From So-So to Solid: 5 Social Media Benefits for Contact Centres

How to use social media in a masterful way to help improve standards of service without getting caught in a training trap.

Over the last several years, there has been a marked shift toward businesses providing some aspect of customer service via social media. Though there are still many holdouts, companies taking advantage of smart social tools stand to benefit significantly. In fact, Twitter and Facebook, two of the most popular social media channels and those most frequently used in the customer service setting, boast over 1.5 billion users between them.

One issue with social media is that adding it as a legitimate service channel comes with several caveats. Before a contact centre can really benefit from going social, smart managers need to evaluate whether they have the right tools – technological and human – to pull it off effectively.

There’s no question that social media has changed the landscape. According to a recent essay by social care expert Guy Stephens, “Social customer care did not set out to disrupt or destabilize [the traditional service model], this was a natural consequence. Customers had unwittingly unlocked the service genie from the bottle for themselves.” So how can smart contact centre managers use this social media “genie” to effectively offer cutting-edge service?

How Customers Evaluate Social Media Service

The way your customers will appraise your social media customer service depends largely on a few key factors:

1. Amount of effort required to solve the inquiry
2. How swiftly and completely the issue was settled
3. Their personal experience during interaction with agents

Unfortunately, social media’s first contact resolution (FCR) numbers are a still good ten points lower than live agent telephone assistance: telephone service scored 71 percent while social media only “rang in” with 61 percent approval. This means it’s not yet time to pull the plug on telephone service in order to go fully social. But there are a few key ways to use it to your advantage.

How Social Media Benefits the Well-Rounded Contact Centre

Adding social media as a full-fledged service channel requires investment in technology, training, and technically proficient staff. Once those key linchpins are in place, social can help the wired contact centre:

Broadcast common problems or frequently asked questions

Using social media to broadcast the answers to common issues and FAQs can help lighten your agents’ loads and even save you payroll dollars by reducing the number of live agents required on certain shifts.

Valuable insights and spotting trends

When agents get frequent calls about a service issue or product problem, that’s a sign that there’s a larger issue at hand in your supply chain. The same applies for high social media “traffic” surrounding specific issues. Social media insights can provide valuable information about problems that need attention within your business as a whole.

Put a “face” and “voice” with your brand

While calling scripts are important for live telephone agents, social channels give your brand the ability to carve out a more personal, less formal image. Customer interaction on social media is a great way to develop your brand’s unique voice and create a presence customers know and trust.

Successful escalation to more appropriate channels

Important information and insights gathered by social media service agents can help telephone agents or contact centre managers resolve complex problems should escalation be required. Knowing when to escalate is an important aspect of agent training and should be a key point of focus when preparing existing agents or new hires to handle social media service.

High–speed service (for better or worse?)

Social media operates at lightning speed, just like the rest of the Internet. For this reason, social media service can allow your contact centre to show impressive resolution times when agents are able to successfully answer and resolve inquiries in a timely fashion, ideally under an hour. This may be a good thing or a bad thing for your firm; it depends on whether you are prepared to operate at this lightning speed. Keep this in mind when choosing when and if to escalate your social media efforts.

Social Media is Here to Stay

Whether or not now is the time for your business to upgrade or escalate your social media customer service efforts is an important decision. If the time is now, consider the points above to make a seamless transition. If these points cause you to question whether or not you’re ready to invest fully in social, consider our free white paper for more information on how to run a thriving multichannel contact centre.