I just returned from spending a few weeks in the Asia Pacific region. A highlight of my trip was a series of joint seminars we did with Frost & Sullivan and some of our key regional partners. The seminars provided a snapshot of the wildfire-like growth in social media and how customers have happily left their vendors behind as they seek out trusted opinions and voice their candid perspectives on products and services. The seminars also delivered some emerging insight into how some of RightNow’s customers are combining two distinct functions to bring social interaction into their customer service strategies.
While some customers have gone forward with specialty-focused social initiatives like “Twitter Groups” and “Facebook Friends,” others seem to be taking a more integrated approach, looking to incorporate social monitoring and social interaction into their overall contact center focus. I’m seeing growing momentum with this incremental approach among RightNow customers. They are taking RightNow Cloud Monitor as a way to listen to what’s happening in social networks, identifying actionable incidents from that listening, and then transforming those incidents into actual work items through RightNow’s Dynamic Agent Desktop. Customers are creating custom workspaces like “Facebook Tabs” right in their agent desktop, and are building out skills-based routing strategies in their centers that include “Facebook” right along other skills like phone, chat, and e-mail. Customers seemed thrilled that they can drive meaningful, measured interaction through social media channels in the same agent desktop where agents interact with callers.
This approach is exciting, but it’s scary too. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked “What’s the best practice in setting our cloud monitor settings?”, or “How many Facebook sessions can an agent support at one time?” The social landscape is evolving by the minute, and it’s growth is like nothing any of us have ever seen. And yet somehow we collectively have to figure out how to get back into customer conversations in ways that build trust and create authentic influence. I think our customers are on to some good ideas here, and I am looking forward to being a part of the journey!
Nice stuff you have here! For companies with contact centers, using all available resources to promote business increases traffic and, ultimately, helps deliver profitable results. As the professional market evolves, more and more companies are turning toward social networking as a way to maintain and promote business and services.