Is the hype round social media as a business communications tool justified?

Paul White, CEO mplsystems
The hype about social media is justified. There is a massive ongoing dialogue out there in the social media universe. People are discussing and talking about your brands, your products, your customer experiences. You can either sit on the edge of that process or be intimately engaged, an integral part of the social media dialogue. If you’re a business-to-consumer organization, where promoting and protecting your brand is important to you, then that engagement with the social media world is absolutely essential.

A lot of the first generation social media products have been about monitoring and listening to conversations in the social media universe. The next generation of products is really going to be about taking that monitoring capability and starting to engage and interact with the dialogues that are happening in the social media world. In many cases, that really means transporting the responsibility for social media communications into your customer services centres where you’ve already brand ambassadors who are able to deal with lots and lots of interactions and comments and types.

The technology is available now to basically take social media and engage it more into what’s going on, but much more importantly, to get a scalable resource, like your contact centre, responding to and participating in those dialogues, not just listening. It’s definitely not about just listening. It’s about engaging with the social media dialogues.

Are we starting to see social media make a big impact on customer service?
I think there are an awful lot of people playing with social media. It’s something that’s pretty much the domain of the marketing department at the moment. Increasingly, what we expect to happen, as social media scales and becomes a much more high volume communication interaction, there’s no way the marketing department can handle that sort of volume. It needs to be transferred to the experts in managing and communicating with your customers, which is typically your customer service department. Really, the future of serious social media adoption is going to be in the customer service world rather than just a toy for the marketers.

What are the challenges for social media in the customer service world?
There are going to be several challenges when deploying social media into a customer service environment. Essentially, the costumer service agents have already got the vast majority of skills that they need. They are already the ambassadors and representatives of your brand across a whole series of existing channels. To be honest, that integration of social media with existing channels is just as important as treating social media as an entity in its own right. It’s important to understand not just what customers are doing with social media channels, but what phone calls they’re making to you and what other types of email or SMS interaction they may be having with your business.

The customer service agent will be able to see a comprehensive list really of all of the interactions, whether it be social media or some other more traditional routes. Of course, where it is necessary to differentiate specific skills, again because the heart of a true social media solution is a multimedia ACD or universal queue, you have the ability to do that sort of skills. Better routing capability to route the right interactions to the agents with the right skills in the same way that you do with a phone call or an email is still absolutely fundamental.

What developments are we likely to see in social media customer service going forward?
The other key development is integrating your social media channels, the tweets from particular customers, with the customer data that you hold as a whole about that customer’s previous communication, whether it be via the phone, whether it be via an email. Really pulling and building a picture of how you can interact with those customers and how they want to interact with you is going to be a really, really important next step.

This comes back to my earlier point that social media is not about a stovepipe system, a wart that you fasten on to the side of your organization. It’s got to be an integral part of your multimedia communication strategy. It’s got to be built on universal queue or multimedia ACD technology. If it’s not, basically you’re barking up the wrong tree, and you’re probably not going to have the sort of scalable solution that integrates social media into all of the other channels. That’s got to be the desired outcome here.