Customer Service through social media is here to stay! The so called Social Customer Service (*) is a reality that many companies will not be able to avoid, either if they choose to address this challenge proactively or if they choose to react as issues pop up in social networks.

We all have read or heard somewhere that, in social media, "people will talk about you, either you were there or not" so you better be listening and joining the conversation. On the other hand this does not mean that people are going to stop using traditional customer service channels to see their questions and problems solved. Far from that. Social Media is just one more channel you need to add to the equation.

Regarding this subject I came across an interesting infographic that summarizes the state of Social Media Customer Service and provides some interesting insights. It starts by confirming that people are turning more and more to Social Media to solve their customer service problems.

Using common sense we could all say that this is true. But it's interesting to look at the numbers:

•    57% of customers go online to find solutions for their issues. From these, 33% go to online forums and 25% watch tutorial videos.

I have recently attended Call Center Summit Europe, where guest speakers described how they improved the provided service and customer experience at their contact centers. Guest speakers came from a wide range of organizations, such as government institutions, hotels, banks, telcos, and so on.

Almost everyone touched 3 essential points important to their organizations and that accounted for a successful change in the customer strategy.

1. Empower and engage agents
   
   It is never too much to stress the importance of motivated agents. They are the engine that moves the contact center and without them, not even the most state of the art technology can do the job.

   Everyone agreed that agents must be passionate about customer service, act with humanity. If agents have these skills “built-in”, the organization can teach them to talk to people, that´s the easy part, the one that can be learned. Even though most part of the agents are very young, they should be treated with respect, as adults because they are the ones dealing with serious customer problems and must be able to give customers a sympathetic attitude, even if they can´t do anything to solve the problem.

   For example, a 20 year old agent that still lives at home has to understand the credit problems of a 40 year old man with a family to take care of. It is also very important to give agents responsibility, as the good agents can work with that on their behalf to be motivated and be excellent customer service professionals.
   
   

I had the opportunity to interview Rachel Miller from Impact Learning Systems regarding the growing importance of Social Media in the Contact Center industry. Here are the main take-aways:

Who owns Social Media? This is an interesting question. Currently most corporate social media appears to be handled by marketing departments or individual employees who have voluntarily set themselves up as powerful brand advocates. For long term success it seems logical for the ownership to transfer to customer service and support. Customer service and support employees are very knowledgeable in the company’s products, services and policies and are often the end touch point for a social media interaction. If it ends there – maybe it should start there?

Industry trends show that social media and chat support channels are on the rise. How should companies prepare staff for proactive channel management? Social media is a smart way for companies to promote their brand, educate the market and engage with customers. Staff must have access to appropriate social media monitoring tools and receive necessary training to ensure success.

Are Contact Centers ready for Social Media?

In the Product Marketing team we follow Kate Leggett on Twitter and are frequent readers of her blog.

Recently, we came across Kate´s summary of Forrester's Top 15 Trends for Customer Service In 2012 and decided we should do an analysis of how we could help our customers meet the challenges pointed out in the article.

The challenges for Customer Service in 2012 can be grouped in the following areas:

•    Agent and customer experience
•    Knowledge management
•    Agile and proactive service
•    Business process and key performance management
•    SOA and Outsourcing growth

In this paper we explain how Altitude and our solutions can address each of these 15 trends.

Never before the idea of “do more with less” has had such a great impact. Companies strive to boost sales and customer service while at the same time maintain or, if possible, even reduce costs.

To achieve this goal companies should integrate their CRM application with a contact center solution that enables them to automate interactions with contacts, excel in customer service, and have a unified view of the contact across the company.

Contact center agent desktops should automate the interaction with leads, freeing agents to concentrate on what is important: the contact.

At this year’s Workout (check out my previous post if you don’t really know what I’m talking about ) I met again with Eric Vrieling , IT project manager for Intrum Justitia Netherlands.

I had the chance to meet Erik on a previous business trip to the Benelux office where we were able to do a video case study with Intrum Justitia.

Intrum Justitia was kind enough to let us visit their offices in Holland and sit down with Erik to have a candid Q&A.

We decided to dive a little deeper into Eric’s perspective on what made them select us as their contact center solution provider. We thought we could get a little more insight on what Intrum’s choice really means to them and their customers. 

Intrum Justitia Group is Europe’s leading Credit Management Services (CMS) company.  They chose Altitude after a selection process in which our experience in the credit management market, our dialling technology and the fact that other Intrum offices had already installed our solution were the deal makers.

It is good to start 2012 receiving the recognition for our work in 2011. It is my pleasure to share with you that Altitude uCI™  won the 2011 Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine’s Product of the Year Award. Click to read the full announcement.

There are a lot of mixed expectations about 2012. In the western world,  the macro economy has become a major source of concern for citizens, while in emerging countries there are still some strong growth rates representing increased spending.

This trend is supported with the third quarter of 2011 results from online research firm Nielsen:  31 out of 56 global markets experienced declines in consumer confidence.