(Note: This article was also featured in the February edition of Contact Center Professional)

Social media is transforming the contact center landscape.  When your company gets social media right, it can be very good:  engaged customers, a data gold mine, and the opportunity to let your best customers become your best advocates.  When you get social wrong, though, things can get very bad very quickly.  Social media holds enormous potential, but the sheer volume of information along with customers’ higher expectations means that there are huge pitfalls ahead for companies that make social media mistakes.  Next generation contact centers can help your company get social right.

The first thing your company needs to do is decide what level of social media interaction you want to allow.  Some companies simply don’t allow customers to comment on their brand pages.  That’s a valid option, but you may turn off social savvy consumers who view social media as a primary communication channel.  Other companies take the challenge of encouraging consumers to interact with them on their brand pages, even asking for information about deals or requesting technical support.

The great strength of social media channels is that they let you actually dialogue with customers, but your customer service agents have to be trained to handle that dialogue appropriately.  Customer support needs to know when to respond, how to respond, which communication method to use, and how to tailor responses for customer retention, upselling, or both.  At times customer service agents may need to respond on social media, create a support ticket, and continue the conversation with the customer through another medium such as video or live chat.  Get it right and your customers will brag about you; get it wrong and you risk going viral the wrong way.

USAN can help you get social right.  USAN can help your company deliver personalized, branded and compliant multi-channel communications that result in unified and consistent customer experiences.  We can help you harness the power of social data while ensuring customer retention and maintaining the competitive edge of top-quality social media customer service.  Contact us to learn how USAN can help you get social right.