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by
Philippe OUGRINOV on
March 16, 2011
The intersection of social media and customer care poses increasingly urgent questions to brand mangers. Who is going to respond in real-time to customer complaints on Twitter and Facebook? What type of skill set and special training is required for the personnel tasked with the response? How will I monitor the activity and resulting customer outcomes? Is there software that can make all this easier? Can’t I outsource this to my call center?
The emergence of Social Media Customer Care was the hottest topic at last month’s Call Center World in Berlin. Many large companies who actively manage their online reputations are turning to call centers to fill this important function. And this presents a huge cross-sell opportunity to those centers.
Enterprise software’s biggest players are stepping up to the opportunity. Providers such as Cisco and Siemens have developed applications designed to arm contact centers with the alerts, data and resources needed to manage customer care via social media. The software also integrates the activity within other traditional channels such as telephone
Homeshoring
Social media customer care shared the stage with talk about recent trends in Homeshoring. More and more companies from different services industries report a positive experience with homeshoring. It is in line with the behavior of the Y generation; for them it does not matter where they work, but what they work! Many Contact Centers in the US & Europe report that home shoring is more a quality improvement experience than a cost reduction experience. What is saved on office infrastructure is invested in technology to support the work from home.
Homeshoring provides benefits to all 3 parties involved:
- The Employee: Employees with rotation principle allows them to save time and money on commitment.
- The Customer: For the customer the experience is purely based on quality. With homeshoring there is usually no background noise, and the customer gets a more personalized discussion (the agent is at home and is much more concentrated and devoted in the conversation).
- The Contact center: the benefit is higher productivity. Stay-at-home agents are more efficient and focused, and the result is better quality performance.
There are challenges, though, which is why most call centers begin by experimenting with a rotation principle. Under such a scenario, employees work 4 days at home, followed by one day in the office. For added incentive, poor performance demands that the employee come back to work full time in the office.
A very good article and I totally agree.
Definitely social media customer care represents the future. And just because social media is so widely used today, providing top-of-the-line service is paramount to the overall success of a business.
A customer who has received an unsatisfactory response on Facebook or Twitter is just a few clicks away from turning a case of bad customer service handling into an online advertising nightmare for that company, as he or she may transmit that response to the entire list of friends and from there it could spread like wild fire throughout the web.
Extra caution should also be given to the problem of transmitting personal data on such networks which could then be seen by all the users of the network (for example when a customer wants to confirm a delivery address or payment details).
So I think therefore that the profile of an agent doing customer service on social networks has to be rather different than that of a usual call center agent. He has to be a lot better trained, a lot more customer focused and a lot more opened to new technologies and approaches towards service delivery, as a mistake made in the online environment could have a lot more devastating effects for a company.
The response to these issues could be the outsourcing of such services to call centers that specialize in such kind of means of service delivery, as the costs with recruiting and training could be significantly reduced and companies would have the certainty of having professionals providing their customer facing functions.
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This is one of a useful article. To do homeshore job really provides benefit to the employees and customers. Thank you for posting this nice and helpful article.