Unified Self-Service

In a recent whitepaper entitled “Social Media Services: Trends in Customer Care Outsourcing”, International Data Corporation (IDC), a leader in market intelligence for telecom and information technology, looked at some of the key trends and differentiators in Social CRM.

A key point in the study is that Social CRM is still very new ground. Making an investment now allows organizations to “get in on the ground floor” and lay the framework to support additional channels as they evolve, and to be part of the creation of the best practices for what works in the social sphere. As the technology evolves, it’s likely that social will cease to be an “add-on” or optional support channel and much more likely that it will become standard to CRM implementations due to customer expectations. (This evolution may happen faster than you think: per a recent story on MediaBistro, 71% of 16-24 year olds indicate the first thing they do when they have a problem with a product is go online, and the shift to social channels is not exclusive to that demographic. ) The overarching goal is to create a single, unified view of the customer. This way, appropriate social media interaction with the customer can be conducted with the appropriate history and context.

Some of the key differentiators of social CRM that will require your business to put new best practices into place are:

• Channels are now customer-dictated. While voice-based call centers offer only inbound and/or outbound IVR customer service, consumers will chatter on social networks of their choice, at whatever time they see fit. Your strategy and technology for monitoring and responding via these channels will necessarily evolve. Technologically, the biggest challenge will be combining all of these communication channels to maintain a single view of the customer, so that social interactions can be tailored to the individual with the same history and context as a voice interaction where an agent has the benefit of a screenpop with all the relevant information.

• Conversations are continuously adapting, and non-scripted. When issues are escalated from automated systems, call center agents still can often work off of a script while social conversations are more likely to go into tangents and often have a different set of rules of (n)etiquette. Agents may need special training, particularly if they are not digital natives.
• New metrics are important. Because of the visibility of social channels, there is now significant transparency into the sentiment about your brand. Appropriate analytics will need to be implemented to separate the signal from the noise and evaluate not just sentiment, but also efficiency, effectiveness and return on investment for your efforts. Reporting tools and dashboards can assist subject matter experts and other stakeholders in assessing this data.
• Timeliness is critical. Much like how channels are customer-dictated, many businesses – particularly large ones – will find there is a 24/7 expectation of rapid responses via the social channel.

Once these core competencies are understood, they are used to enable the three critical activities in the social space: listening, understanding and responding. Each phase incorporates different elements of the aforementioned core competencies. Listening requires appropriate tools and analytics; understanding requires sentiment analysis and the ability to put feedback into context; responding requires accuracy and timeliness.

At Voxeo, our Prophecy and VoiceObjects platforms let you create a social CRM tailored specifically to your business, and provide unified self-service across channels so that you can reach customers in the way they want to be reached, whether it’s via SMS, social media, mobile apps or voice. To learn more about the ways in which consumer expectations are evolving in the social and mobile space and how your business should be responding, check out our whitepaper, “Unified Self-Service: Delivering On the Value Of Multi-Channel Customer Interactions.”

You’ve heard it from everyone and from everywhere – your business needs to be involved in social media – and now it’s time to think about the “why” and “how”. For most businesses, the “why” is obvious. Your customers are active and vocal, and your competitors may be, too.

Not long ago, we had this video – “Socialize This” – created for our customers, to showcase how social media has reached critical mass and encourage everyone to get involved in the conversation:

These are just few of the stats from the video, and what they might mean to your business –

• In 2010, Generation Y outnumbered the baby boomers… and 96% of Generation Y is active on at least one social network. If you’re at all interested in reaching this demographic, you’ll want to reach out to them through social media.
• There are 90,000 Facebook status updates a minute, with four billion daily content shares. With numbers like that, whether your ears are burning or not, odds are someone is talking about you.
• The average Facebook user has 130 friends.  Multiply the number of Facebook fans you can attract by 130, and that’s an estimate of your potential reach just via that one social network. (Getting  just one person to talk about you can get you in front of an average of 130 potential customers!)
• 80% of Twitter usage is from a mobile device. This means two things: it means that customers have a tool at their fingertips to share their feelings immediately, making their “first impression” of your customer service extremely important. It also means they are likely to be actively out and about, giving you the opportunity to reach them while they are in the process of selecting a product or service!

The end result of all these numbers is that customers’ experiences are now easier for them to share – and those experiences are likely to be amplified across their social network, whether good or bad.

Once you’re firmly convinced of the “why”, the next step is determining exactly how your business can leverage social media.

• The first step: monitor. Most small- to medium-size companies don’t have someone dedcated 24/7 to social media, so a technical solution can help; in a Developer Jam Session, we discussed using Voxeo technology to search for social mentions or monitor incoming messages, and to send SMS alerts to the appropriate personnel in your organization if certain keywords occur repeatedly, or at all.
• Next, respond: A study last year by Maritz Research indicated that only about a third of those who tweeted a complaint to a company received a response. Of that third, 83% “liked” or “loved” hearing back from the organization. For the two-thirds of companies that didn’t respond, this represents a massive missed opportunity to make the conversation more positive. If you receive common queries via social media, there may be opportunities for efficiency in automation – in another recent post, we discussed a solution for providing automatic responses via social networks when appropriate.
• Third, be proactive. With 66.1% of Twitter users saying retailer tweets influence their purchases to some degree, you’ve got an incentive to be vocal, sharing your active promotions and new product announcements along with responding to customer inquiries.
• Don’t forget to analyze: The number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers you’ve amassed is always good to know and grow, but more advanced tracking of sentiment analysis surrounding your brand, the number of Twitter queries and responses, and other metrics are even more useful measures of engagement. Voxeo technology can also mesh this data with the analytics and applications you use for communication channels like voice, SMS, IM, and mobile web.

And when you’ve mastered the art and science of responding to customer inquiries via social media, your next step is to further cultivate those relationships so that you have a true community of brand advocates who love your product or service and want to shout it from the rooftops. It may not be easy, but there’s never a dull moment, and the right tools for the job can help you monitor, respond to, and engage with the ever-growing social community.

Feedback? Leave a comment, or even better, reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter (@voxeo)!

Want to learn about how you can prepare your contact center for working with social media? Would you like to know more about the trends happening in the industry?

In about 24 hours, on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, at 2pm US Eastern time, I will be joining with Wendell Black from Contactual to discuss these changes and solutions in a free webinar:

Preparing Your Contact Center for the Rise of Social Media

It is free to join the session.

Here is the session abstract:

Social Media’s impacts to traditional methods of providing customer service cannot be ignored. More and more individuals are turning to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and similar forums to connect with businesses and organizations and this trend shows no signs of abating. In this session you will learn how to navigate the new world of the connected and sophisticated customer.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Important trends in multichannel and social media customer interaction methods
• How social media is impacting customer experience optimization efforts
• How organizations are leveraging multichannel interaction to better service their customers
• Benefits of an integrated approach to managing the proliferation of customer interaction touch points
• Important steps organizations can take now to prepare for these new communication mediums
• A glimpse into the future of customer contact as social media gains mainstream prominence

I’m looking forward to joining our partner Contactual in giving this session… and am looking forward to answering the questions attendees have as well.

Again, it’s free to register and there will be time for questions at the end. We’d love to have you join us!

Want to learn about how to integrate social channels into your existing customer interaction channels?

On Thursday, April 28, 2011, I will be part of a panel webinar put on by CRM Magazine on the topic of:

Integrate Social Media Into Your Customer Channels, Now!

The event happens live at 2pm US Eastern, 11:00am US Pacific. It will also be recorded and you can view the recording later.

You can register for free over on the DestinationCRM site.

The abstract of the session is below… there will be plenty of time at the end to ask questions – it should be an interesting and educational session that will provide a couple of different viewpoints on how to integration social channels into your existing environment.

Here’s the abstract:

With the popularity of social media and mobile devices, it’s in an organization’s best interest to interact with customers on their preferred communication channels. To be successful, organizations must deliver a consistently high level of customer service across all communication channels – even the new ones. This requires integration with traditional interaction channels so that social conversations become a natural extension of the contact center. It also requires multi-channel analytics that foster actionable insight. Fortunately, new solutions are available to do all of this.

Watch this social media roundtable of experts and learn:

• How to monitor social conversations and find out who is talking, what they are saying, and where these conversations are taking place.
• Ways to listen to social conversations and provide appropriate automated responses.
• Strategies to integrate social channels with traditional channels (e.g., speech-enabled IVR, click-to-call, and text messaging).
• How real-time, cross-channel analytics can improve your understanding of customer behavior, identify areas for improvement, and enhance customer experiences.
• How to create unified routing/SLA/prioritization for social conversations that are deemed important enough to act on.

Over on Time Warner Cable’s “Untangled” blog, Jeff Simmermon published this great infographic on “Cable Customer Service In The Age Of Twitter“. I snipped just a part of it to illustrate here, but you really need to head over to their site and check out the full version:

Kudos to Jeff Simermon and whomever else helped with designing the graphic. First, they show the process they use… and then they get into some solid numbers about how many people they can help. Also a nice touch that they then introduced their team of tweeters and highlighted some trends they saw in the inquiries.

Very cool to see!

Now, I did note one aspect of the blog post:

The @twcablehelp team is now available until 1:30 AM EST, Tuesday – Saturday, and available until 12:30 AM EST Sundays and Mondays.

It doesn’t say a start time, but I’m going to imagine something like 8am EST.

So what happens if someone tweets out a problem at 2:00am US Eastern? What if a whole bunch of people tweet out problems?

What happens if people start tweeting out “Time Warner FAIL” at 3am?

Based on the blog post, I’m guessing those tweets wouldn’t be seen until the morning… at which point the customers may have become more upset and those tweets might also have been retweeted a good bit.

This is where an appropriate level of automation could help.

As we discussed in our recent Developer Jam Session on “Building Apps To Monitor Social Channels” and our earlier session on “Scaling Your Twitter Support“, our platform could be used to create apps that monitor your Twitter account and either reply back if appropriate or alert human agents if a certain level of tweets were occurring – or tweets with keywords such as “fail”.

In this case here, Time Warner could set up an automated app that monitors their @twcablehelp Twitter ID during those hours when their staff is not online. The automated app wouldn’t even necessarily have to reply to people on Twitter… it could just monitor and then when certain events occur the app could trigger some action. For instance, when:

• someone tweets out “#FAIL” along with the account name
• a certain volume of tweets are sent to the account from a single Twitter user
• a certain overall volume of tweets are sent to the corporate account (indicating perhaps that there are some outages and so people are tweeting in asking what is going on)

If any of those events occur, the app could either call someone on the Twitter response team or send SMS messages to someone’s cell phone. In fact, if certain thresholds were exceeded, the app could call or SMS multiple people… even the whole team… to let everyone know that there is a potential issue that needs to be examined.

I wrote a basic version of this kind of app to run on our Tropo service and documented the app in a blog post along with all the source code. Obviously it would need to be extended to deal with the volume thresholds I mention here and storing that info in a database, etc…. but you can see the idea of how you could create such an app to help scale your Twitter support so that you always have some coverage on your Twitter account.

Anyway… I digressed a bit from the excellent infographic… you definitely need to go check it out! We need to see more data like this from companies showing the very real benefits they are receiving from supporting social channels.

And when you are setting up a system for monitoring social channels… we’d then love to talk to you about how our platform can help you scale your support. Drop us a note, contact us on Twitter, comment here on this blog post or on our Facebook page, or… gasp… you can use that phone thingy to call us, too!

So there we were about a half-hour before our Developer Jam Session about building SocialCRM apps (recording and slides now available) and Tobias Goebel was just testing out his demo, which had been working fine earlier.

It didn’t work!

Naturally we first looked at our infrastructure… but everything checked out perfectly fine… the issue was that we weren’t seeing any tweets coming in from Twitter! Since we’re naturally paranoid about doing live demos, we had backup plans: Tobias’ slide deck walked through the demo – and we had a YouTube video of the actual demo available, too.

After the Jam Session was over, we continued our investigation… but had the issue solved by a tweet from Twitter and a post on their status blog:

Oops.

This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of working with social channels for an organization such as ourselves. If this were the first time this had happened with Twitter, it wouldn’t be a big deal… but it seems to happen often enough with Twitter that it gets frustrating. Particularly because we at Voxeo are also in the business of providing a communications platform – but we put an insane amount of focus on ensuring that our global infrastructure remains carrier-grade and always available. We in fact go so far as to back that up with a 100% Uptime SLA (Service Level Agreement) to our customers.

So Twitter’s lack of reliability does drive us completely nuts at times.

Still, what are we to do? Twitter is the social communication channel that so many people are using. If we and our customers want to interact with their customers over social channels, we have to be able to work with Twitter using the APIs they provide to us.

So we do what we can… provide a rock-solid platform on our end for customers to build apps that work with Twitter… and just hope that Twitter can improve their reliability over time. Oh… and always have a backup for any live demos we are doing!

Fun, fun, fun…

Want to learn about building “Social CRM” applications? Want to understand how to make an automated app to help interact with people on Twitter? Would you like to understand how Twitter and other social channels can be part of an overall multi-channel customer interaction strategy?

If so, please join us on Thursday, April 7, 2011, for a free webinar titled: “Social CRM and Building Apps to Monitor Social Channels“. We’ll show you what you can do with Voxeo’s platform and show you exactly how you can get started creating apps that interact with customers using social channels.