Greater Charleston Call Center Alliance

The Game Changer: Social Media

for Call Center Professionals

Liz DeLoachSocial StrategiesMarch 10, 2011

Social Media: The Game Changer

Why Social Media

Mediums

Business Success Stories

Call Center Best Practices

Guidelines for Personal Use

No pressure involved – just the desire to connect with others

Hundreds of millions are there – a potentially huge audience

93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85% believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers.

43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems

41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services

Why Social Media?

Why Social Media?

According to a 2010 study by The Society of New Communications Research (SNCR):

59% percent of study respondents said they regularly use social media to "vent" about their own customer care frustrations

72% of respondents said they used social media to research a company's reputation for customer care before making a purchase

74% percent choose to do business with companies based on the customer care experiences shared by others online

Why Social Media?

A survey by Nielsen Online showed that social networks and blogs are now the fourth most popular online activity, even more popular than personal email.

Social sites are free and easy to use

They can be used to drive traffic to your website (Social Bookmarking)

They provide an opportunity to listen, anticipate problems, and influence the conversation already present about your brand

Approaching 600 million worldwide users.

Fastest growing demographic is between ages 35-55, with women leading the way

You can have both a personal profile and business page - does

your call center have one?

Lots of great organizational tools and widgets to give great functionality

Welcome to

Talk with customers

Generate Leads

Solve problems

Provide content of value

Build trust and rapport

Business Use

Talk with customers

Generate Leads

Solve problems

Provide content of value

Build trust and rapport

Business Use

What is…..

A social networking and micro-blogging service enabling users to send and read brief updates

Tweets: Text based posts of up to 140 characters that display on users page and those of followers

Twitter is a great source of information. You can search topics of interest and follow users posting about them.

Awareness of Twitter has exploded from 5% of Americans 12+ in 2008 to 87% in 2010

190 million visitors per month generating 65 million Tweets a day.

Nearly two-thirds of active Twitter users access social networking sites using a mobile phone.

51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks

Why should we use

Why should we use

Great Business uses of Twitter:

Starbucks posts new offers and also participates in threaded discussions of these offers with their Twitter-followers.

JetBlue offers Twitter-based customer service (notice, they even provide the customer support employee’s name currently on duty).

ComCast offers a friendly Twitter customer support; what I personally like about their profile is the real person photo instead of the company logo.

Five Targeted Twitter Presences

@Verizon-

@HeadlinesVZ

@VZWOffers

@VZWSupport

A Twitter Success

Broadcast yourself on:

A picture is worth 1000 words

In five years, YouTube has reached 2 billion views per day.

In the top three most visited sites with Facebook and Google

Channels are easy to set up

YouTube ready video cameras can be had for less than $200

You can friend other channels and favorite relevant interesting videos and make them available to your site

Broadcast yourself on:

Some ways you can use YouTube:

Customer testimonials

How To’s/Instructional

Market existing products and services

Promote event sponsorships

Business Blogs

Are short entries, usually 200-400 words, on a topic of interest or one about which you are knowledgeable

Should be attached to your existing website, or can be created on sites such as eblogger or Wordpress

Allow you to establish yourself as a thought leader

Can boost your site’s search rankings when updated with fresh content routinely – content is king!

Success Stories

Top Tier Companies successfully using Social Media:

Office Max

Texas instruments

FedEx

Ford Motor Company

Guidelines for your personal sites

Considerations: Choosing your profile pic

Filling out your Bio

Posting content, links, and news

Talking to one vs. many

Guidelines for your personal sites

To friend or not to friend/follow

Settings

Watch your tone

It’s common sense

Executives: provide support and resources to continuously keep its finger on

the pulse of customer sentiment within social networks, and to effectively engage customers and solve issues via the new media.

Directors/Leaders: define center’s specific role in managing critical new channels

develop new strategies and initiatives to ready itself for the emerging social media



Directors/Leaders cont’d

agent hiring, training, workforce management and quality assurance must be carefully analyzed - and altered, where necessary - to ensure success in the social media environment.

new tools and platforms will need to be evaluated and implemented.


Supervisors: The Unsung Heroes

convert social media talk and strategy into action. This includes getting agents ready for the new role; helping agents to continually improve via coaching; and keeping staff engaged and motivated during this challenging transitional period.

Assist with such higher level processes: technology selection,

customer satisfaction measurement, and management as it relates to social media interactions.


Supervisors cont’d

Training: Develop Assessment tools to determine:

If need dedicated social media specialist positions, or add duties to existing staff members

Best qualified agents who have proven that they truly understand and respond appropriately to customer sentiment and needs, as well as grasp of social media sites and tools.


SupervisorsTraining cont’d

Corporate social media strategy

The call center’s specific policies and practices for social media-based customer interactions.

Review social media norms, and the specific culture and rules of each social media site in which agents will be interacting with customers.


Invest in a social media monitoring/interaction application.

Once you “hear” what’s being said, you can easily interact with online consumers - providing proactive service/support, as well as damage control before customer concerns and complaints

“go viral."

Typical social media monitoring applications feature advanced text analytics that can detect key words and phrases that are

relevant to a particular company


Vendors leading the way in social media applications for call centers:

Salesforce.com, RightNow, Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Oracle and SAP. Salesforce.com's “Service Cloud” customer service application is able to connect directly to Facebook and Twitter.


With these tools, A call center agent can: monitor conversations over these

sites while simultaneously viewing data in a sales app that provides in-depth product/service information to help answer questions.

The agent can then post those answers to Twitter, resolving the problem not only for the customer in question, but also for customers to whom the original customer is connected who might be experiencing similar issues.


Additional Steps:

Create a uniform corporate presence on key social media sites.

Create your own company-hosted, customer-to-customer social networking communities

Develop sound QA processes for social media interactions.


Additional Steps: Incorporate CRM into your social media strategy.

Determine: Why are you participating?

What percent of your customer base uses which sites?

How can social media improve the customer experience?

Will social media help you build and reinforce your brand?


Determine:

How can you support agents in monitoring and responding to social media?

How can social media help you build your knowledge base?

What protocols are in place to help agents determine when and how they should respond? How can agents use the knowledge base to support conversations?


Ultimately, the goal of your social media efforts is to listen to customer concerns, respond to their needs, and solve their problems.

Questions??

Resources International Customer Management Institute Nielson Online Society for New Communications Research

http://www.ecrmguide.com eCRM Guide. www.socialmediatoday.com Social Media Today www.zdnet.com ZDNet www.socialexaminer.com Social Examiner www.mashable.com Mashable www.hubspot.com Hubspot

Thank you!Liz DeLoach

www.socialmediawiz.biz

[email protected]

Twitter: @LizDeLoach

(843)532-9335