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.
