Till 1990, before the social media revolution started, customer service industry was completely reckoning on websites for channelling incoming telephone calls to the correct representative. But the advent of social media has brought about a great change in the phase of a customer service industry. Though social media is not making the industry go upside down, it is definitely altering the rules of the way people get in touch with the brand. According to a survey by Nielsen Online, social networks are the fourth most popular online activity surpassing email marketing. With growing social media popularity, people are getting more acquainted with it. Common man is not restricting himself to tweeting posts; he is sharing customer care experiences and talking about products and services really loud and making BPO and Customer Service industry take a backseat.
Customers usually share their experiences with family, friends and acquaintances. With social media they have got a chance voice out to millions of users. This feedback shows direct impact on brand reputation and their perception about products. As a result, BPOs are missing out on billions of voice calls and text messages to overcome the social media hurdles. Most customers prefer talking to a real human over the phone immediately when there is an issue. However, customers end up ringing to IVRs saying the most boring cliché ‘Your call is important to us’. Though there is no single solution, following are few aspects that BPOs and customer service industry would be helpful. The key is to go tango with social media. Here are three basic steps you need to do to deliver excellent customer service.
- Listen and respond: Use the valuable insights procured from IVR, social media networking sites. Listen to every conversation on the phone and even on the social media sites and categorize them based on specific tags. By doing so, you can prioritize your feedback received ad act accordingly. You can get a richer and more niche forecast with the social media. The cost will be reduced as most conversations are online and not telephone calls charging mounting for every call. Social media sites can be handled remotely making it easy to address customers’ issues on the go.
- Speeds up the process: Though there are 100s of call centres, the response time taken for in the case of social media channels is less than what it takes for traditional call centres. A good social media service would help representatives handling each category better and faster. Social media here reduces number of calls without sidestepping services levels. Decreases the average time taken for grievances. Improve customer satisfaction rate and generate brand awareness.
- Utilize social media for lead generation: Based on all the insights and feedback, categorise the issues handled by the customer service and come up with the top 10 issues customers are facing. Create an FAQ page with these top things. This helps customers get more information and reduce wait to get answers. By predicting the topics people would love to read create great content. Great content brings in qualified leads. This will increase revenue, brand will be found by more prospects, and community can grow at a steady pace.
With the above aspects specified it is pretty clear that call centres, BPOs and the entire customer service industry needs to go tango with social media in today’s world. Here are a few changes that businesses need to make to the company and the staff to improve service and also cope up with technology.
- Train teams to make them social media specialists. Though your team has consistent Tweeters and avid Facebookers, it is very important for them to be trained about the customer servicing through social media. Dedicated social media specialists enhance the levels of engagement, commitment and likewise performance.
- Spend time and money in monitoring social media. Usually there is a lot of noise created through social media. But cutting through this clutter and identifying the right voice and addressing it is one of the top challenges. For this, the organization needs to listen to very keenly to differentiate the priorities. Organizations have great demand for social media applications that can identify keywords and make sense out of it and address it.
- Have a normalized social media presence. When there are a lot of customer service reps getting into discussions on social media networks, there are high chances for loss of brand consistency. So everybody and anybody posting on the brand social media profiles need to adhere to brand guidelines.
- Ask customers to call you when needed. Not every customer issue can be handled through social media portals. At some point of time, customer service reps need to pick the phone and call or email.
- Integrate CRM into social media strategy. CRM is one thing that makes people understand customer’s needs through social media channels and anticipate their needs.
Last but not the least, to manage and overcome the disruption, building deeper relationships with is most important. Businesses into telemarketing customer services need to get these aspects into action before it is too late.