Considering the nature of social media is viral – it’s not too soon to start thinking about how social media will impact (and become part of) your contact center’s service strategy. SAP CRM is already addressing social media with capabilities in Service and Marketing, so how about a bit of focus on the social media channel within SAP CRM Interaction Center.
Consumers are exchanging information on organizations and products via social sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blog sites and wikis. Many organizations have established their own company sponsored feedback sites and are already using these channels for marketing and have some more informal means of monitoring and responding to relevant posts. Feedback can be positive, negative, and in other cases informational, providing technical or expert based support. Anyone’s customer service experience can reach thousands of people in minutes, yielding a major impact on your organization. The nice thing about this information is that it is available for you. There are means by which companies can monitor social sites, engage customers and provide response or feedback where appropriate.
Here lies the rub, responding to or addressing posts about your company or products/service is currently a highly unstructured process. If you consider the impact email interactions have had on contact centers, you might recall the issues surrounding the training of agents and implementing enabling technologies. Email response was initially quite unstructured and the volume was not massive, but overtime volumes increased, best practices were developed, auto or standard response became common. Once again the customer service strategy needs to be addressed to determine the best approach to handling the most unstructured channel of all – Social Media. Although the difference here is that Social Media is viral and rather permanent. An organizations inability or failure to respond to a negative post of a high profile blogger or Facebook member doesn’t just impact the author and a few folks they’ve talked to (as with email), it impacts everyone they reach and anyone considering doing business with you using the web for research in order to make an informed buying decision.
So, wondering where to start? Join my colleague John Burton for the kick off of the ASUG Interaction Center Influence Council focused on Social Media and other unstructured interaction channels (with a sneak preview of what’s new in Enhancement Package 1 for CRM 7.0 Interaction Center). This session will be held at ASUG in Orlando, on Monday, May 17th, 1:30-2:45pm in the Influence area, room 105B West. This council will be ongoing and create a collaborative setting to discuss the topic of unstructured interactions in your contact center answering question such as: - How do unstructured communication channels impact your contact center, service strategy and organization overall?
- What’s the role of the contact center in supporting these types of interactions?
What are the impacts and the pros and cons of adding support for unstructured channels?
What are the challenges experienced and to come?
What’s the business case for Social CRM/Media in your contact center?
Hope to see you there!
To learn more about the objectives of the ASUG Interaction Center Influence Council visit the council’s home page.
