Last week on Valentine’s Day we posted a graphic novel style story, A Customer Engagement Love Story, to depict how a fictitious major florist could provide multi-channel service with the USAN customer engagement platform. On the same day, Business Insider posted this story, Valentine’s Twitter Hell For Florist That Failed To Deliver. The article describes how FTD handled an influx of Twitter-based complaints. It’s interesting the article has a “happy” ending because so many similar writings are pointing out companies failures at social media servicing, including some of our own posts.

According to the article, “Dedicated social media teams are now a must for any company wanting to engage directly with customers on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. They have a great role to play in managing a company’s reputation and how they deal with complaints is crucial.”

It’s interesting to see the companies that respond and those that don’t. Referencing (again) an article at BI we talked about last week, “Brands Don’t Read Up To 97% Of Tweets About Them“, a major company like Costco “didn’t publicly respond to a customer who complained recently on Twitter that there was a chunk of wood in a muffin she bought there.”

It’s only a matter of time before Costco and all other major brands, as well as smaller companies with big dreams, will consistently care about and respond to social media service issues. But when they do, and they inevitably turn to a technology provider to help them monitor social channels effectively, what will they look for? There are tools available today that can monitor a social channel and report back what has been said about a particular brand (Radian6 is perhaps the best known). And separately there are tools that can be used to interact with these social users (Hootsuite or TweetDeck) – many times through the channel itself (Twitter’s Direct Message, Facebook wall posts, etc.).

They will need an enterprise solution that can both monitor the social activity and provide the communications capability, all while keeping the dialogue in context with the customer relationship in other channels (i.e. their interaction history and purchase history in every channel). USAN offers such a platform today.

Using the FTD example, what would happen if a customer were to make a negative social media comment and then call the florist for service? With the USAN CE platform, the call center agent who answers the call would already be informed about the social media activity (i.e. a Tweet that says “FTD stinks!”). They would also have any other real-time information about the caller such as their order history. From the outset the agent is better prepared to provide better service to the caller, who is already upset and does not want to retrace the steps that got him to this point. Of course, depending on the scenarios, an agent could respond directly in the social media channel, too. But the real power in the USAN solution is the ability to have context about all channels in a single interface, so the service experience is unified.

Contact us to learn more or attend the Multi-channel Customer Engagement in Action Demo webinar on Thursday, February 28th at 2pm EST.