I was in Florida last week at Frost & Sullivan’s Contact Center East event. This event draws about 100 contact center executives and professionals – from companies such as the Ritz-Carlton, MySpace, iRobot, Readers Digest, Aramark, Pitney Bowes, and Travelocity — all gathered to share their experiences, insights, challenges, and best practices around customer experience and the contact center. The beauty of this event (other than being held at the Marco Island Marriott Resort right on the gorgeous Gulf Coast) is that it was highly interactive; every session was a discussion, not a presentation. This made it really easy to hear, straight from the trenches, what is going on in the contact center. There was a lot of discussion about metrics and measurement, the challenges with a blended model (at home agents, outsourced, onshore, offshore…), maximizing a multi-channel strategy, and how best to analyze customer data. But the one topic that bubbled up in nearly every session was social.
I wasn’t surprised social was a hot topic, but I was surprised at the myriad of opinions on the issue. Some execs (like those from MySpace and iRobot) were excited about the impact and opportunity of social networking on the customer experience. In fact, during her keynote, Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Experience and Operations at MySpace, said, “you can rock a customer’s world if you respond to their complaint on Twitter!” There were many who said they knew they needed a social strategy, but didn’t know where to start or what to do (for those of you in this camp, I suggest you start here). Some understood the impact social networking is having on the customer experience but come from such old-school, traditional companies they were struggling with convincing senior management of the critical need to monitor and engage in the social web. And, I was astonished to hear, there were actually some contact center managers that thought social networking was a flash in the pan and there was no need to put resources toward monitoring or participating. Even after I shared Dave Carroll’s story (click here if you aren’t familiar with how United broke his guitar) they didn’t think social networking could negatively impact an organization!
In a closing workshop, Frost & Sullivan analysts Joe Outlaw and Ashwin Iyer tried to dissect the current state of social and help attendees develop a strategy for harnessing the social web for better customer experiences. During this session I heard an interesting stat: 20% of tweets on Twitter have a product or brand reference. This alone makes me wonder how there can still be folks out there that don’t see the current and future impact and opportunity of social networking.
If you are interested, you can also see my tweets from this event here.
great article!