A senior manager recently asked me “why should I introduce these so-called game changing technologies to my business? They’re just another way of doing what we have always done rather well.”
To his surprise I agreed, but then I asked him when his PA last used a typewriter and the penny dropped. His customers want to buy goods and services, receive marketing material and technical support as before, but in a radically different way. If you can’t service your customers’ needs in the way they want you to, you’ll lose them to the competition – rapidly.
Integrating social media with your Business Communications strategy is much more than just a ‘nice-to-have’. It’s a business de facto and the contact centre’s role in your customer experience management strategy cannot be underestimated. Customers believe that a company’s ability to respond to a problem or request has a greater influence on a quality experience than any other factor, which puts the contact centre at the heart of consistently creating a differentiated customer experience and therefore value-add.
So your operation needs to do more than simply meet last year’s service levels, be efficient or attain an industry average. It must create a distinctive, integrated experience that the customer cannot replicate anywhere else – often called brand loyalty.
So why do we continue to see low satisfaction rates with contact centres? Is it because too many managers are comfortable with their typewriters and are unwilling to accept the new customer contact dynamic?
If you cannot monitor customer dialogues across multiple channels – speech, texts, emails, IM, social media etc and react to them, you’re missing out on vital intelligence that you could use to increase revenue, control costs and enhance your brand.
With the arrival of social searching in Google+ and its recent general availability, the opportunity to appear higher in searches based on positive social media posts and drive traffic towards your website (or indeed the complete reverse) just took a quantum leap forward.
So it’s vital to make social media an integral part of your Business Communications strategy, to strengthen customer relations by capturing the details of what customers and competitors are saying about you, acting promptly and increasing ‘social positivity’. You’ll grow revenues by identifying and maximising cross-sell and upsell opportunities and ultimately drive an improved customer experience by building an accurate view of customers’ behaviour and trends.
Readers of my previous blog will remember that my Mum’s washing machine played a part in a cutting edge business experience and may wonder how that could involve another game-changing technology?
The repair man arrived and after taking the washing machine apart, asked my Mum if he could film the back of it. Still unsure as to how this would fix the old girl (the washing machine, not Mother!), she agreed and he duly performed the repair whilst filming
the various stages with a running commentary and wirelessly uploaded the film
clip to an intranet site.
By adding the repair video clip of an elderly washing machine to the on-line engineering knowledge base, he made this data available to other engineers for streaming if ever required. As a result, the company’s engineers do not carry bulky manuals and can drive smaller vans but carry more spares in the space available, which reduces transport costs whilst improving the company’s green credentials. Now that truly is a cutting-edge business experience!
By ONI’s Contact Centre Business Practice
