Customer service in the age of social sharing

There isn't much room for customer service mistakes these days.

After all, every business has a CRM system, a quality monitoring solution, hundreds of years of coaching and training knowledge, speech analytics tools, desktop monitoring and analytic tools, etc., all implemented with the common goal of improving customer service.

With the proliferation of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as smartphones which can transform a quick thought into a viral message before the thought is reconsidered, a lone customer service error can grow into a whole lot more.

Salesforce acquired a company called Radian6 with the purpose of integrating social media monitoring with your CRM dashboards.

If someone's mentioning your brand on Twitter, it's now automatically posted on a dashboard immediately. Forward-thinking companies will have a social response team patrolling these feeds, responding with honesty and integrity. If they don't, it will only make it worse.

Yesterday I had walked into a convenience store and showed them an item I had bought which had an expired date. I simply wanted to return it. They didn't even apologize for selling me the item, never mind offering me a new one.

My first reaction, the emotional outrage, was to break out my Droid Razr, snap a picture of the date on the item and then of the store logo and post it to Twitter. Why would anyone want to do business with this store?

Of course, after a few seconds, I thought about it. Maybe the cashier was having a rough day, and maybe this incident isn't representative of the entire store chain.

The Droid Razr went back into my pocket.

How often does the reconsideration not happen, and the blistering comment get posted?

Does your company have anyone who is actively monitoring social media for brand mentions?

Are they equipped to respond?

We're now enabling multi-channel monitoring in our call recording and quality monitoring suite, Virtual Observer, where you can record web chats, emails, social media response, etc., and bring those interactions into your evaluation and scoring process.

If you're going to be out there responding, optimize the way these situations are handled and include them in the quality initative.

Note: since this incident, a highly reputable, upscale store whom I don't frequent, happened to ship me a pair of totally used (thought we were purchasing new) rain boots for my 3 year old son. Crazy!

I tried to call and give them a chance to put their stellar reputation to work and they proceeded to make me transfer and re-tell my story three times. Frustrating.

I returned the boots to the local store, went home and ordered them on Zappos for the same price. Zappos shipped them to me next day, for free.

I ended up relaying the pleasurable Zappos customer experience to the store I had previously purchased the boots from, and the clerk actually told me "I know. Zappos is great. I can't believe we had actually shipped you the ones you returned to us (they were not only worn but discolored.)."

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Flatten Your Global Cost of Ownership for Call Monitoring

Back in 2011, we launched the latest version of the Virtual Observer (VO) quality optimization solution, ushering in a new web interface along with a fresh and redesigned layout for the application. As the system has seen fast adoption within our customer base, some of the side benefits have begun to emerge.

VO has always offered businesses the lowest cost of ownership in our space, a crowded space (over 30 competitors at last count!), mainly attributable to agile development, minimized overhead costs, fair pricing and managed expenses.

We've been able to scale VO to enterprises across multiple locations, globally, with hybrid voice system integration and mixed business needs.

The new version completely flattens the global cost of ownership for customers in a variety of ways, making it far more affordable to scale recording to the far reaches of your enterprise.

- VO is now accessible anywhere in the world with a simple web browser. Remote workers or customers can now be authorized, with proper permissions, to play back or score calls without having to install any software.

- Virtualized environments: in most environments, customers can spin up a virtual machine as opposed to having to buy hardware or audio boards. This not only will reduce your carbon footprint but also your bottom-line IT expenses.

- The emergence of active recording methods utilizing API (application programming interface) integration directly within the phone system (Avaya's DMCC integration, Cisco active recording, Nortel DMS, Mitel, ShoreTel, etc.) also removes the need for audio boards.

- Reduced training time is created by the ease of use and familiarity of the browser. Training is now performed more often than not via remote teleconference/webinar methods, reducing travel expenses and out-of-the-office time for your key employees.

- Virtual Observer customers enjoy painless upgrade paths to our latest version of product at zero software dollars. They pay only a nominal professional services fee to have the new system installed. This is in stark contrast to the expensive forced upgrade path our industry is used to.

- Agent development and training can now be accelerated with the introduction of VO's Agent Portal features, which brings the agent into the quality optimization process and actually humanizes the automated elements of quality monitoring.

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Top 10 Benefits of Real-Time Dashboard Analytics for Contact Centers

The Dashboard Analytics feature set available in Virtual Observer 4.0 has many benefits for today's busy contact center:

1. Gain real-time contact center performance snapshots and insight into emerging trends 
2. Keep all vital information on one screen rather than having to switch through multiple screens
3. Focus on high level results and drill down as needed through multiple levels
4. Detect patterns across multiple dashboard components
5. Find inefficiencies in agent skill sets and create targeted training programs to improve the overall performance
6. Generate trending reports to provide evaluation feedback by day, week, month, quarter, year, etc.
7. Identify actionable changes required in your scoring process
8. Measure your agents against standard scores with attainment reports
9. Focus in on specifc agents or questions to uncover agent weaknesses or discover your next superstars-in-training
10. Compare peers, groups or departments to see the collective gaps and performance gains

When asked by Customer Interaction Solutions about analytics, Coordinated Systems, Inc., was eager to speak to changes happening in the industry as well as some of the enhanced dashboard analytics released in their web-based Virtual Observer 4.0 call recording and quality monitoring solution.

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

Customer Interaction Solutions: What business needs deliverable via contact centers are you seeing a growing demand for i.e. (a) knowledge management, (b) operational efficiencies, (c) multichannel management, (d) increasing self-service success rates, (e) customer retention and (f) sales/collections performance that you are seeing more of and why?

CSI: All of the above are important, but the one I've seen emerging as an in-demand request are for tools which focus on the customer experience (retention). It’s more and more vital to retain your current base versus spending tremendous monies chasing new business…there's an old adage there somewhere. Multichannel especially social media has gotten a lot of press these days. We haven’t really seen any requests for incorporating Twitter or Facebook (News - Alert) streams as scorable, recordable data points. On the other hand web chat has really seen an uptick. One of our customers, a large expo producer, has noticed a large percentage (20 percent) of customer traffic now flowing through that channel. I also surveyed our customers and a good number of them can see a point where web chats will exist alongside recorded calls, screens and e-mails.

Customer Interaction Solutions: Customer interaction channels: such as contact center live agents, self-service, social media and others such as retail have been housed in silos, making difficult to obtain 360-degree insights from via the information they collect on which to perform analytics. Are these channels beginning to break down or are they still locked in? Are firms getting it that they must rip apart these walls? What strategies do you recommend in response?

CSI: It's becoming more and more apparent that the applications we use today and in the future will be required to offer an API for easy access to data. Even beyond that, the app engineers will need to make it WYSIWYG so the data becomes accessible to any business analyst or application who needs it. With strict privacy controls in place, this should be fairly simple to pull off. It's kind of like when Facebook asks you to give permission to an app – you’re essentially a user who is allowing an app to have access to your data (and your friends’ data - yikes!). I can envision a social network of business applications...apps that are pre-authorized to access each other's data.

Customer Interaction Solutions: Firms appear to be more so in an "I-want-it-yesterday" mode when it comes to information, intelligence and insight. Are you seeing this and what are the drivers?

CSI: This is most definitely the case. We're now fashioning our performance reporting data as real-time, multi-level widgets which can be inserted into any users’ custom dashboard environment. The main drivers for this would be a need for speed in all areas of business analytics. The faster you get your data, the faster you can analyze it and make decisions based on it. We’ve equipped Virtual Observer version 4 to offer a wide range of dashboard analytics to meet this demand.

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• Customer service in the age of social sharing (call-center-stories.blogspot.com)