Social Contact Center as Part of Ruthless Digital Disruptions
Introduction
Social media as a channel is getting greater traction and being successfully integrated into contact center platforms and solutions. However, the future may demand a spin-off and lead to the emergence of a standalone “Social Contact Center.” This can be primarily due to ever-increasing mobile and chat usage and the Gen Z population which is extremely social. Already we have social CRM and BPM products that are upcoming in line with the principles of better customer engagement and workflows triggered from social media. There can be a debate that Social Contact Center is a methodology, a set of technologies, or mere a portmanteau or catchphrase.
What Could Drive Social Contact Center?
Social media is hyper-connected and has the true potential to provide service excellence. The evolution of customer service and experience leads to an increase in social business models which can give you both quick wins and blows. Thus, there is a better chance for whereby customers provide support to one another through community-based platform and approach.
From “like” to “share” and now it is more of “care.” Digital autonomy which already trending is now sky-rocketing due to the pandemic crisis. It goes beyond self-service to self-care, self-provisioning, self-personalization, and so on.
Combining selfie-service with self-service: Simply put “selfie-service” refers to customers enabling other customers via sharing their text and images. By the way, partnering and co-creating the way the brand is built. Nowadays, it is very rare that a business succeeds without a well-crafted social media strategy. If we put a funny disclaimer, it would be: “starting businesses without digital marketing and social media strategies is highly injurious to the investors.” Such is the importance of social media strategy that must include provisions for customer service, experience, and so on.
What is beyond personalization and contextualization is peculiarity or idiosyncrasy: some unusual and surprisingly quirky facts to be known beforehand about the customer is the expectation of the modern-day users and this does not mean intruding on their privacy. The anticipation is that we should know something unique about the users that the users themselves do not consciously realize that they are interested in. Such an approach is possible with social media combined with analytics. All those likes, dislikes, raves, and rants are there to decipher and demonstrate Z-gen high-octane personalization.
Why to Carveout When it Fits Well Within Contact Center Systems?
The natural question is that if contact center platforms can integrate well with social media channels and bring unified experience, why we need to have social contact centers as a separate entity.
Chat-first Approach: Digitally native businesses have a strict chat-first approach for customer experience, you would have experienced this in food delivery and ridesharing and booking apps. It is not that easy to reach them via the voice channel. By this time, chat would have surpassed voice by leaps as the preferred channel. Pandemic pushed and still pushing digital transformation to a different level, with its iron fists. If we still drill a bit down, web and social media chats will compete with each other. Facebook Messenger has 1.3B users. Social media contact centers can rightly fit these small and medium digital-born businesses, and large enterprises will still have more voice-inclined customers, and social media as a channel suits them well.
Simplified Social Media Care: Start-ups and SMBs can have dedicated social media handles and take it from there to create a restricted and cost-effective but still efficient CX framework that can provide customer service, experience, quirky personalization, targeted marketing, and so on. Ideally, it can become “one throat to choke” in the CX journey. It is a pattern that we can observe in digitally native companies to have restricted channels yet effective CX influence. On the other hand, already many big brands of the world do have dedicated handles and providing excellent social media care and reaping the real benefits of “selfie-care”.
Social Customers: These are social media fanatics who influence the way CRM and customer service industries go more social. Companies who embraced social media and have socially-enabled contact centers get a gamut of benefits ranging from increased sales, brand loyalty, and so on. Overall, the marketing funnel is made conducive for customers to move from awareness through loyalty to advocacy by having a social media ecosystem that provides customer service and marketing opportunities. Transparency and testimonials in social media are directly proportional to the trust index of a company.
Marketing and campaigns: Generally, contact centers are being transformed from overhead operations to revenue-generating groups. The social media contact center will best fit this bill with its data insights on who likes what on a demography basis. In the previous section, we spoke about the million-dollar question: “what is beyond personalization and contextualization?” Believe you can relate to the same points here. Nobody wants plain-vanilla bombardment of notifications and emails. Digital campaigns will be a core component rather than a tightly integrated one with the social contact center.
Possible Workflow
Many companies are successfully providing social customer care via dedicated handles and some still just restrict them to closed chats prohibiting posts on their wall. The social “listening” system has to triage “noise” by setting up priorities. In the first level, we can let bots help and let the users self-serve. Then, bots can create a case or ticket and/or escalate to agents. Though this looks typical approach, please refer to the following image for variations.
Final Thoughts
About 5 years ago, social customer service is a contradictory phrase as most of the companies did not reply to the queries and comments by the users via chats and posts. Many of you would have had such an experience. Now, it is a potential game-changer and companies want to desperately get social and build brands. It is undeniable that social media is seamlessly integrated with contact center platforms and delivers results. Social media will take a new dimension aligning with customer service and experience realms and a specialized Social Contact Center is one of the possible ways.
As an almighty digital hub, social media has already taken up some form of e-commerce and all these cab bookings, food delivery, and so on, can also be fitted within the hub and delivered effectively in the future. It is highly unpredictable as to how social media will foray into and disturb what vertical. For example, Diem (formerly known as Libra) is the cryptocurrency venture of Facebook and it goes so on and so forth and so wild! This piece of writing is just a concept paper on what could be the Social Contact Center and spark some useful thoughts.
