Unified Self-Service

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:

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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.

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If you are interested, again, registration is free.

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!

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.