Social Customer Engagement Requires Agility
Business agility has been described as the ability for organizations to sense, prioritize and act. First a business must be able to rapidly sense an opportunity or threat to its business.
It must then have the ability to prioritize and evaluate potential responses to these challenges. And finally, it must be able to act effectively, if necessary.
While many social media monitoring and listening tools enable organizations to sense, they fall short when it comes to prioritization and providing the ability to act.
We see this when we contact an organization on social media with a complex customer service issue. We find that we get a rapid initial response or acknowledgement to our request—the organization has sensed our problem.
However, follow-up for complex issues raised on social media is often poor and often no better than for traditional channels, thus indicating that the organization’s ability to prioritize and act is compromised.
Customer service speed expectations are higher on social media than for other customer engagement channels. Customers frequently use social media channels as a customer service short-cut and a way of avoiding contact center delays.
Where customers may be prepared to wait 24 hours for an email reply to a problem, on social media this isn’t the case. In addition, customers are choosing social media for more urgent requests and expect to get an answer—not just an acknowledgement—inside an hour or less. In order to meet these expectations, organizations must become more agile and enhance their ability to prioritize and act.
A number of software capabilities are necessary to deliver the ability to prioritize incoming social items and then act effectively. Enhanced business rules functionality such as Verint Smart Match can be deployed to address prioritization. Key to transforming how issues are prioritized are rules that enable social requests to be given a higher priority, automatically routed to customer service based on topic or sentiment, and routed based on employee skills, availability, workload or department.
Organizations also need the ability to act effectively on social media. Customers expect a similar experience and quality of service via social media that they would receive via email, voice, chat or any other channel.
It should also be remembered that younger customers may not even use email or voice. This means that employees engaging socially must have access to customer account information and contact histories in the same way as a traditional contact center agent. This can be done by automatically linking customer social IDs with an existing customer record and ensuring that social conversations are stored in the customer contact history.
In addition, supporting employees with knowledge management and case management applications can help organizations meet their speed expectations when employees are asked to act on a social issue.
Social engagement is different from other customer engagement channels. If you are going to engage socially with customers, you need to become agile. That means you must not only sense issues on social media, you also must be able to quickly prioritize and act.
Find out more about how Verint can help transform your social engagement agility.
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