Archive for the 'Customer Service' Category
April 14th, 2010 by dnomura
Sorry for the sporadic posts since we fired up the blog, but we assure you it’s because things have never been better and busier here at Buzzient! Currently I’m on my way back from the KANA Customer Summit (we were one of the partner sponsors) where we met great KANA customers.
A common theme I heard from companies was their desire to start leveraging the intersection of social media and support/service/contact center. Of course this isn’t a KANA-specific phenomenon. “Social CRM” is becoming a hot topic and in this context it points at customer service.
Not surprisingly, to this point much discussion around social media has been linked to the marketing/PR groups in an enterprise. Certainly these teams benefit greatly from analyzing and integrating social media content about their brands/products.
However more and more, many of your customers are becoming conditioned to using social media to voice problems or issues rather than picking up the phone or emailing customer support. Plus you can’t control this part of the process anymore. You might say users have to send an email or call when they have an issue, but that doesn’t mean they will.
Unlike traditional support channels, when using social media customers aren’t contacting you directly about their problem. Instead it’s like they’re walking into the town square at noon and yelling about it to anyone who’ll listen. Their online megaphones are vehicles such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, discussion boards. Now if they have a problem a lot of people will know about it, and that carries potential for negative effect on your support perception, brand, etc.
What’s also becoming apparent is that when they’re out there yelling, they’re starting to expect you to be listening. That’s great, but just throwing technology or a team of people at social media monitoring won’t cut it. As with many things in business, it comes down to a combination of processes + people + technology. You need to extend/adapt/modify your support process to include the social channel along with email, chat, phone, etc.
The good news is you don’t have to panic. This is simply a new channel. Unstructured, largely uncontrollable, with lots of sub-channels, but simply new. A way to increase service levels for your customers. Who doesn’t want to provide the best service they can?
Realistically it wasn’t that long ago when email was the new channel for customer service. You incorporated it into your support processes and perhaps moved from phone-only to multichannel support. Same thing when chat came along.
Social can seem intimidating because of all the “sub-channels” involved — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, communities, etc. There isn’t a single stream coming in like there is via email.
As mentioned, adjusting your business processes to address “social CRM” for support is critical and this should be step one. But as you assess your processes, you can feel confident that Buzzient can help you with the technology to support harvesting, consolidating, analyzing and integrating social media content as an additional channel into your support workflows/systems (such as KANA, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, etc.) The right technology can help you mitigate the human resource factor in your new processes.
You can leverage Buzzient to help get appropriate posts into an agent queue or create cases/service requests based on automated criteria or on an ad hoc basis. Buzzient can help with the customer engagement over the social channel as you resolve their issues. Importantly, your new processes might also leverage social media to build your knowledgebase with issue solutions users are posting. If you have self-help as a priority, this could become a very valuable way for you to harness social media to benefit customers.
December 14th, 2009 by dnomura
“That sounds great. Where do I start?” This is a common theme we hear. Let’s say your company makes the business decision to take advantage of social media. But now what? Just figuring out where to begin can be a challenge.
The focus of this post is to talk a bit more about using Buzzient as a social media integration platform with CRM. There’s benefit to be had from using automation to integrate the social media channnel and content with your CRM system(s) for lead generation and customer service. For many companies this is a tangible and valuable place to start.
Leveraging social media in these cases doesn’t require you to jump into social media as the initiators of conversations (you’re respondents). Participating in social media as initiators is a different aspect you’ll need to think about and assess whether it’s consistent with your business goals. But taking advantage of social media to find more leads to help drive revenue and commiting to proactive customer support to drive enhanced satisfaction can’t help but be consistent with most company’s business goals. Can’t it?
Buzzient provides the technology that enables you to extend your CRM system to the social realm to help you address this new channel in your sales and service processes. The channel and the methods you use to interact might be new, but your lead qualification and customer service workflows are still the foundations.
You probably have workflows in place to address lead suspects/prospects and customer support issues in your CRM system. Perfect. Leverage the time, effort and expertise you have in your CRM investment.
Buzzient as a social media integration platform integrates with CRM systems so you can use the technology “behind-the-scenes” to find, store and analyze lead- or issue-oriented social media posts. The platform integrates this content within the CRM system so users don’t have to utilize a separate application.
Of course there is also great value in social media analytics. Integrating social media with CRM to derive lead generation and customer service value is just one place to get started. Depending on your business goals, you might benefit by starting with analytics. But we’ll cover that in a subsequent post.
Lead Generation
You might have suspects/prospects coming in from email campaigns, direct mail, good old return cards, website activity, trade shows, etc. But are you taking advantage of social media as a lead generation channel?
People are making posts via Twitter or forums or other social media channels about a desire to buy your products, those of your competition and/or products in your industry area. It’s easy to assume authors are primarily talking about consumer goods, but they’re talking enterprise purchases too. Asking the world, “I’m looking for a new xyz, what does everyone think?” isn’t uncommon anymore.
Getting these social media suspects/prospects into the CRM lead qualfication workflow just like your other channels can boost your lead generation results. It’s important to note that these suspects/prospects aren’t replacing the leads you’re getting from current efforts, they’re adding to them. Your reps can initiate and track conversations with these suspects/prospects using the authors’ social media vehicle (Twitter, blog, etc.) without having to leave the CRM system.
Customer Service
Your customer service organization might be addressing support through an online ticketing system, call center, email, etc. But are you taking the next step to proactively support customers who are talking about their problems via social media? Are you leveraging community-answered issues by getting them into your knowledgebase?
Something like “Having such-and-such problems with xyz again, can someone help?” is seen more and more. Perhaps along with a response such as, “Same problem I had. I was able to fix it by doing a, b, and c.”
Proactively getting social media customer issues into the CRM support workflow just like your other channels can enhance customer service levels. Does this increase your queues in the short term? Probably. But is it valuable to you to establish yourself as a company that makes the effort to reach out and support customers? Will solving an issue early (as it’s broadcasted on social media) and getting the solution into your knowledgebase save dealing with many tickets for the same problem later? As with the lead/sales reps, your customer support agents can initiate research with the customer using the authors’ social media vehicle (Twitter, blog, etc.) without having to leave the CRM system.
Of course these examples might require you to adjust your business processes somewhat to embrace social media as a new channel for lead generation and support. But the benefits from increased leads and elevated customer service levels can be worth it.
Buzzient integration includes the ability to communicate with the author of the post via their social media channel, from within the CRM system. This is an important point. The lead/issue came from a social media post, there isn’t a phone number or email address. Only their username. So if they tweeted, talk to them via Twitter. If they posted on a forum, talk to them there. Without leaving the CRM system.
You can see an example of Buzzient’s deep integration into CRM (Oracle CRM On Demand is used for the example) via the demos page, under the Social Media Integration section.
Of course Buzzient Enterprise also provides deep social media analytics. But for companies who are focused on leveraging what’s being said on social media to maximize lead qualification and enhance customer service, using Buzzient as a social media integration platform to CRM is the way to link the social channel with your CRM.
December 7th, 2009 by tbj
I still remember the moment in “Soylent Green” where Charlton Heston realizes that his daily meal was, well, organically-grown. Behind all the mystery and the technological miracles, there was the sudden realization that things are sometimes simpler than they seem up front.
Even with the inexorable merging of CRM and social media analytics, I often get the question: “Why should we tie our CRM system to a social media analytics platform like Buzzient?”. This is a valid question; CRM rollouts have too often turned into multi-year affairs, with extensive customization and end user costs.
My response is pretty simple: regardless of all the hoopla and whiz-bang gadgetry that some are using to describe social media, it really comes down to the simple fact that social media is “made of people”. It’s not just about the content types, the ability to monitor MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s more important to acknowledge that behind every user handle there is a real person; a potential consumer, a purchase influencer, or maybe an existing customer. Listening and responding to these people isn’t a matter of being “cool”, it’s essential to the mission of CRM.
Therefore we at Buzzient will continue to drive innovation in how social media connects to CRM. We won’t stop until you pull the software from our cold, dead hands…(’props to Charlton Heston, RIP).
October 16th, 2009 by dnomura
Back from a great OpenWorld experience. It’s amazing how Oracle has gotten the logistics for this event down to a science. Even Tuesday’s downpour didn’t seem to have much effect, other than the venues scrambling for more rugs to keep people from slipping on slick tiles.
Many have already posted about OpenWorld and the progress in Oracle Social CRM. The tools that help drive more sales through sales user collaboration look great.
Having been in the CRM space during the early days, I remember customers’ sales management expecting promising results from the reporting and accountability CRM systems provided. But I also remember the grumblings from sales reps themselves who preferred to continue using Act! or Outlook. Oracle’s Social CRM tools give reps a benefit to using the CRM system.
As an Oracle Partner, we’re excited to be able to provide a platform that enables an external aspect of social CRM integration for Oracle CRM On Demand and other Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Customers are able to leverage unstructured social media content by integrating it into their CRM workflows. Benefits such as expanded lead gathering, enhanced customer satisfaction, quicker investor relations action and more are achievable.
This isn’t just for getting social media posts expressing a level of buying interest into the lead qualifications workflow, but also those talking about problems or issues into the customer support workflow. We’ve also seen more and more examples of HR organizations finding social media content from current or prospective employees that need to be addressed, in other words they need to get those into a workflow too.
Many departments in an enterprise can benefit from learning and leveraging what’s being said about a company when the author isn’t talking to you, or under any type of survey bias. An important consideration is getting these posts that need action into the appropriate workflow so you can document and take action.
September 9th, 2009 by tbj
We’ve been predicting for quite a while now that mainstream business applications would eventually recognize the impact of social media. With the rate of user growth in social media exceeding that of any other aspect of the internet, any B2B(or B2B2C) applications vendor needs to have a strategy to reach out to users congregating in social media. Whether for customer support, lead generation, or product development, social media data MUST be incorporated in the workflow of business applications.
Today, with the release by Salesforce.com of their ServiceCloud V2, we’ve seen a formal embrace of integrating Twitter with Salesforce.com CRM.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-salesforces-service-cloud-2/
Nevermind the fact that we’ve been quietly doing this for months at Buzzient (;o)); this announcement should serve as as wakeup call to other vendors for the need to have a social media integration strategy.
What Salesforce (and RightNow for that matter) and other CRM companies building internal social media extensions don’t address however is the inherent heterogeneity of complex enterprises. Everywhere there’s Salesforce.com installed in a complex enterprise, I’m willing to bet one will also find evidence of Netsuite, Oracle(Siebel, Peoplesoft, Hyperion), SAP, and other applications. Any social media strategy should also include a way to provide access to that data for on-premise applications as well as products from multiple suppliers. In this fashion, a customer would be enabled to follow a social media post across not just CRM, but also ERP, BI and other business functions. We at Buzzient are committed to making THAT social media marriage come to pass!!!
July 10th, 2009 by tbj
We’ve been chuckling the last few days here at Buzzient about the “United Breaks Guitars” social media scandal. For those of you not aware, Dave Carroll of the band Sons of Maxwell released a video on YouTube skewering United Airlines for not only breaking his guitar as he watched from his seat, but also for United’s customer service (non)response. The video is slick, funny, and gets your toes tappin’ pretty quickly. At the same time, it’s a stroke of genius in how social media can be used to (belatedly) educate a company about the importance of customer service.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
After a generation or so of reduced customer service and amnesia re: the mantra “the customer is always right”, the customers are now biting back. When last I checked, the video had about 1.5M views in about 4 days. In an era where leisure and business travelers are scrutinizing every travel dime, and with new entrants such as Virgin America coming into the market, United Airlines can ill afford the bad publicity this is already causing.
Purely by chance, a Buzzient stakeholder asked us to start analyzing the electronics and musical instrument manufacturer category last year. As a result, we have a pretty significant database of social media postings and comments about various manufacturers, including Gibson and Taylor(the brand of the unfortunate “sacrificial guitar” in the song). In particular, Buzzient Enterprise keeps track of the key websites where enthusiasts are posting. These social media sites and niche forums are precisely the places United should look to advertise to repair their reputation.
Oh, and for my next fishing trip, I’m bringing my fly rods as carry on luggage!
