Cisco Brings Social Media to the Contact Center with SocialMiner

Cisco’s new SocialMiner could be very helpful to customer service contact center phone agents and managers who are trying to understand and leverage how social media affect customer loyalty and behavior.

Social media are changing marketing, and no group is more impacted than the agents in the contact center who have to work with customers day to day. Cisco’s new tool allows agents to monitor in real time conversations that refer to the organization and its brand. SocialMiner appears to integrate the communications from the brand perspective and provides a window into specific customer experience through blogs, forum posts, status updates and other forms of immediate and social network communications.

The key now is to see how effective it will be in driving more profitable relationships and how it influences overall buying and other behavior. It also remains to be seen whether contact center and other organizational managers will consider it an important part of the customer interaction.

Information is always a good thing, but without the right context, direction and understanding it cannot be truly leveraged.

Point of view from the Telwares Contact Center Practice

Sam Bloomfield, Practice Leader at Telwares for Contact Center Solutions, shares his commentary on a recent Harvard Business Review article, and offers his perspective on institutionalizing empathy in the customer experience:

A recent Harvard Business Review piece [Why Small Companies Are Better at Customer Service] addressed how large companies can learn about productive customer service from small companies. The article’s author related his personal experiences about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customer service. The author concluded from those experiences that smaller companies have a lot to teach larger ones because the people in smaller companies can “empathize” with the customer and therefore deliver better service. And large companies need to learn to empathize more.

In fact, while empathy helps, it simply is not enough.  The cited examples also showed, although not observed explicitly by the author, that smaller companies were able to resolve the problem – produce a satisfactory result for the customer.  In the small company examples, the employee did not just empathize, s/he also satisfied our author.  Those results I would suggest are the key to effective customer service and experience.

So empathy is fine – up to a point. When a customer service representative does not help you resolve your problem empathy alone loses its currency. Also, large organizations trying to appear more empathetic often devolve into a ‘script’ or canned responses like “I am so sorry” or “I apologize”.  We simply don’t trust that they mean it, until we see what they can do for us.  You can’t institutionalize caring, trust or empathy because those traits, if they are genuine, are not just words but sincere feelings. I would suggest that this customer in the article was ultimately really satisfied because of the actions taken.

Large companies are usually effective at creating processes that standardize activities for large numbers of interactions with repeating patterns. But they often fail at creating a standard process for establishing a trusting and sincere relationship with their customers, the very foundation upon which rests all successful call center interactions. In short, one cannot create a process to elicit a sincere human emotion. As consumers, we have all had experiences where the customer service agent tells us how ‘sorry’ she is regarding some service or product we don’t like. But more often than not this empathy is not sincere or appears to be insincere, because ‘sorry’ and apologies are, in most cases, only ultimately effective if they are supported by a specific remedy. Often the agent is not able to create that satisfaction because he has not been ‘empowered’ to do so.

So how can organizations that must operate, because of their size, in a disciplined and structured way, develop sincere empathy and really mean it? This usually requires nothing less than a cultural shift that goes to the very core of the organization’s values. Companies like Netflix and Zappos appear to have that culture and it is clearly reflected in the customer service they provide. But creating that kind of culture, particularly for an established organization, can take time and commitment. Sometimes transformation is the only effective way to develop truly empathetic relationships that deliver.

Large organizations must accept the need to recreate their cultures in order to provide the service that customers will value and to organizations to which they can be loyal. Empathy may be good foreplay but it will ultimately leave the customer even less than satisfied if that is all there is.

AT&T Call Center Solutions Announcement

Commentary from Sam Bloomfield, Contact Center practice leader at Telwares -

AT&T’s announcement that it will be offering a hosted solution for call center operations is consistent with the trend of moving more telephony and CRM application to the cloud. Like all solutions there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. It is useful to have this solution if you are willing to surrender some control over some of the basics you were use to having. At the same time it demands reliable and fast connectivity and confidence in the available of ATT resources to make changes that you need, unless you have the access and staff to make those adjustments yourself. Most larger operations will probably be less interested in this service/product because of the control issues involved. Smaller shops could see real benefit to this approach and reduce overhead costs associated with some of the on-premise solutions. Be sure to create a solid business case to prove how this should work. Also understand how changes will be made and how quickly and above all understand the level of service and priority you will be getting form the carrier.

The trend to move more and more applications to a central host is rapidly picking up momentum. Carriers and providers like this approach because it allows them to control the relationship, and provide the outsourced solutions, often attractive to many organizations. If you have a hosted relationship the barriers to changing providers in some ways is higher. You may be less likely to make the switch because you are not as in control of the parameters as you were when it was all premise based. At the same time it could result in more movement because you have less control. You may be willing to find a new full service provider because you are used to having another party manage so much of the technology process, and you are used to fewer IT resources on staff. Carriers also like this approach operationally because they can control upgrades, sell in new services and provide the kind of direction they can control, and create trends that increases customer “stickiness.” Just like netbooks are begin to gain market share of significant size, SaaS is gaining in popularity. No new operation, or one that keeps up with emerging trends can afford to ignore this option. At the same time the decision to go with this approach must be decided, like all good business decision, with full visibility into the pros and cons, expense versus investment, and account management and support services and level of overall service level comfort from the provider.

Moving to a state of better practices

Sam Bloomfield, who leads the Telwares Contact Center Solutions practice, has authored a new market brief available on the Telwares website. Sam highlights some practical initiatives for contact center strategies in a tightening recession – here are some excerpts from the document…

“It’s the classic contact center story – organizations attempt to deliver an excellent customer experience with every interaction, but the numbers show they fall short when it comes to how satisfied customers really are. Defining the disconnect is often very simple; the company has defined a great customer experience in a radically different way than consumer expectation.”

“There are many examples of people that transcend their circumstances without the best system, management, or process support – and still deliver superior service. There is no question about it…in a live agent environment people are still the most important determinant of service delivery. They make or break the relationship.”

Download the document from our home page at www.telwares.com