Predictions for the Asia Pacific Contact Center Market in 2011
2010 was an interesting year for the contact center industry in Asia Pacific. The first half of the year was slow and saw limited growth in investment in technology and seat expansions. However, the second half seemed to be much better and pushed the entire year into steady positive growth. Despite several trends being subdued as enterprises made a cautious return from the global financial crisis, we saw increased activity in the areas of Self-service, Analytics and leveraging Social Media for customer service. As we enter the new decade, Frost & Sullivan believes that these trends will be the driver for increased investment in Contact Center Applications.
This insight attempts to discuss the top industry trends in 2011 that are impacting contact centers across the world and especially in Asia Pacific.
1. Return to Customer Acquisition
The theme of customer acquisition will drive investments from contact centers in the region in 2011. This could lead to simply expanding contact center seats, to investing in advanced outbound dialers, or investing in Analytics to help fine-tune sales strategies.
While 2009 & 2010 were dominated by the “More with Less” or like I would put it “More with Lesser” theme, Frost & Sullivan believes that decisions on technology in 2011 will be determined by the need to grow faster and acquire more customers. This does not mean that contact centers will suddenly find an extra pot of cash and hence the need to optimize operations goes away, but the priority of investment will shift towards growth-aiding technologies or processes.
2. Analytics
Reporting has always been a key element of the contact center. Analytics is the next step for contact centers to improve operations and drive customer satisfaction. Contact Centers are struggling to keep up with the changing customer expectations and maintaining satisfaction levels. Analytics promises to deliver improvements in operations, quality processes and customer satisfaction. The bigger promise in my opinion is that Analytics gives the contact center the rare chance to be a Strategic part of the organization, not just a Profit center or Cost center.
Speech analytics technology is maturing and we are beginning to see deployments in Asia Pacific. Though most deployments are still for the English language, we are beginning to see some pilots for non-English languages as well.
Using a combination of speech analytics with data & screen capture analytics, contact centers can not only identify root cause for certain operational bottle-necks or hone directly into the “bad” calls which led to customer churn, but also deliver insights back to the enterprise on competitive deals, product enhancements and marketing effectiveness. Life no longer is about “90% of calls in 30 seconds” but instead looking at the top reasons for customer churn, hence, shifting the image of the contact center to a Strategic part of the enterprise.
3. Contact Center in the Cloud
The last 18 months has seen a significant increase in interest from enterprises to look at Cloud-based alternatives for many IT applications and systems. The value proposition of Cloud-based Contact Center Applications is just as valid as it is for Business Applications such as CRM and Salesforce Automation.
Hosted Contact Centers have been around in Asia Pacific for a few years, and have seen limited success so far. By the end of 2010, we expect over 93,000 hosted seats in the Asia Pacific region. There is strong interest from Telecom Service Providers to offer Hosted Contact Center solutions, and offer bundled packages of Communications & Network Services with Contact Center Application Delivery. Telecom Service Providers in many markets have shown interest and already have a Hosted Contact Center offering. The demand for such services so far has been lukewarm due to the lack of good case studies on the success of such a model and perceived issues with security and lack of control.
The push towards Cloud-based services across Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and the strong benefits that many enterprises are realizing by moving to such a model coupled with the strong validation of the Cloud model by vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Salesforce.com is making CIOs consider Cloud alternatives for a portion of their IT investments.
Apart from local Telcos and Global Service Providers such as BT, some large System Integrators are also looking to start a Cloud service practice and offer a Cloud-based Contact Center solution. In 2011, we expect the momentum for such services to pick up, and drive adoption especially in the markets of Australia, India, Japan, Taiwan and parts of South-East Asia.
4. More Self-Service
Self-service as a trend is more pronounced amongst Generation Y, and given that Asia Pacific has large Gen-Y population, the need to have good self-service channels is critical for most contact centers. The trend towards Self-service is not limited to just IVRs (Integrated Voice Response), but focused increasingly on Web self-service and Mobile self-service.
There is a strong push towards using IVR as a call resolution platform instead of just a call routing tool. There is strong growth in consulting services to identify processes and transactions that can be pushed to an IVR. Markets such as India, China, and Indonesia are expected to see strong growth in IVR adoption.
2011 will continue to see investments in IVRs and Voice Portals, and we expect the IVR market to grow at double digit growth rate in 2011 in the Asia Pacific region.
5. Mobile Customer Care
Smart phone adoption has sky-rocketed in the Asia Pacific region. Mobile Broadband is changing the way consumers are accessing information, using the internet and expecting service. Mobile Applications is redefining customer expectations and is creating yet another degree of separation between the customer and the traditional call center.
In 2011, we expect to see leading enterprises in the Asia Pacific region launch Mobile Applications to deliver differentiated customer experience, and link it with the rest of the contact center.
6. Investments will begin to trickle in for Social Media Applications
2010 was the year of experimentation with social media for customer service. Telcos, Banks and Hotels setup small teams of 3-7 people who would spend their time “listening” to the different social channels, and “selectively responding” to customers. Some companies took a physical world view to the web 2.0 world by operating their twitter responses from 9 AM to 5 PM. Others chose to just listen in and not respond, while very few took a holistic approach to listening, participating and being pro-active on this channel.
Due to the experimental nature, there was little if any investment on social media tools. In 2011, however, as companies get more serious about Social Media and as the trend of Social media continues to be strong, we expect more effort from contact centers in trying to manage this new channel for customer engagement.
There are still many issues with adoption – who should take ownership (is it Marketing or Customer Service?), who decides what to write on behalf of the organization (any legal implications?), what will be the volume of interactions that I need to handle on social, how do I operationalize this new channel with the rest of the contact center, or just plain fear that once you get in, you can’t get out! Efforts on educating the market will need to continue, and we expect real investment on social media tools to begin in 2011.
7. Multi-Channel
Perhaps very Old School for many markets, but given the diverse nature of Asia Pacific we believe that there is still going to good amount of investment in offering a multi-channel service to customers. Markets such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, India and China will see good investment in this area.
More mature markets such as Australia, and parts of the Indian contact center industry will look at ways to better integrate the different channels and provide a seamless and consistent experience across the different channels.
Investments in SMS based notifications, Email and Web Chat will continue to be strong in 2011.
8. Domestic Outsourcing
The strong growth in the Asia Pacific Contact Center industry in the past decade was fueled in a large part by the trend of offshoring and offshore outsourcing. Markets of India and Philippines have seen significant growth over the last decade on the back of this trend.
Although offshore contact center outsourcing still dominates the market in India, the last 24 months has seen a strong growth in domestic outsourcing i.e. companies in India outsourcing their contact center work to Indian outsourcers. This trend is not limited to India, but is also happening across Australia, China, Indonesia and Japan.
The shift from Offshore Outsourcing to Domestic Outsourcing has implications on the cost per seat and hence the cost of technology that these outsourcers will be able to afford, however, given the large scale of business, there is a strong upside in the market due to increased investment from Outsourcers driven by the opportunity in the domestic markets of Asia Pacific.
9. Extension into the Enterprise
There are two ways in which we are seeing the extension of the contact center into the enterprise.
A) Leveraging the larger enterprise workforce as part of the customer service process. This could include enterprise experts who are more empowered than agents to help with call resolution, or leveraging branch workers and remote workers as contact center agents during certain downtimes at the branches. Unified Communications tools such as Presence, Instant Messaging (IM) and Conferencing are being deployed in order to enable such capabilities.
In 2010, the adoption of Unified Communication applications in the Contact Center was in early stages, however, as Banks, Telcos, Retail companies begin to deploy Unified Communications in their enterprise, extending those applications and capability to the Contact Center will also become important.
Apart from extending to enterprise experts, in 2011, the trend towards remote agent is expected to show some growth in select markets of the region, especially Australia.
B) Extending Optimization tools to the Back-office. The contact center has invested significantly over workforce management & performance management tools that have led to increased efficiency in the contact center. The back-office operations in the enterprise have similar operational challenges as the contact center, and are beginning to see merit in adopting Workforce Optimization tools that are used in the Contact Center, for their back-office operations.
In 2011, we expect to see more adoption of such tools in the back-office coupled with work flow management applications as well.
10. Video in the Contact Center
I thought for a while before I decided to include Video as one of the key trends in 2011. As of 2010, the vision of a Video Contact Center was barely existent in the Asia Pacific region with the exception of a couple of deals in markets such as Korea. In 2011, we still do not expect any significant investment in video yet. However, we will begin to see video applications on smart phones and tablets begin to emerge which will require Heads of Customer Service to rethink their stance on a Video-based customer service models.
With 3G penetration rising in Asia Pacific and more smart phones and tablets with 2-way video capability, the chances of having a customer service application that incorporates video capability is not too much of a stretch. However, any main stream adoption for video in the contact center might not happen until the second half of 2012 or 2013.
In 2011, Frost & Sullivan expects the Asia Pacific Contact Center industry to have close to 30,000 contact centers with more than 2.4 million seats, and the Contact Center Applications market to grow in the range of 9 – 11 % to reach close to US$ 800 Million in revenues.
Showing posts with label Contact Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Contact Center. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Building Blocks for a Social Media Customer Engagement Strategy
...Continued from previous post - Press 1 for Twitter
Building a Social Customer Engagement strategy is becoming increasingly important for enterprises, however, enterprises need to be wary of the challenges that come with a social media customer service channel. Social Customer Engagement is fairly new, and is unlike the other customer service processes where we have metrics, benchmarks and best practices to improve our processes. Including Social Media channels as part of the customer service process requires a thorough assessment of the customer base & existing customer contact processes, and the need to build a new set of processes & programs.
Key building blocks for a social media customer engagement strategy would include:-
a) Define Objectives
It is important to clearly state the objective for having a social media customer engagement strategy. Is it to disseminate information, engage with customers in conversations, pro-actively offer support or collaborate on ideas? Once we define the objectives, then the other aspects of the strategy can be explored.
b) Identify Social Channel
An assessment of the customer base and the objectives should define which social channels should be used. Different social channels serve different objectives. Twitter is good for broadcasting messages, promoting discount offers, and quick in-the-moment customer support. So Twitter is a good channel if you have a customer or partner community to broadcast pertinent information, and also respond to customer queries and conversations. Facebook on the other hand is better for customer collaboration and rich media sharing. If the objective is to engage with customers and collaborate with them on ideas, then a channel like Facebook is more apt. The option of creating your own social network or social platform for customers to communicate with one another & with the enterprise also serves the same objective. Using channels such as Youtube is good either in tech support environments where product demos, or troubleshooting videos can be shared. The objective in this case would be product support & training. Other social channels such as Wikis & Blogs are also effective, if the customer requires more deeper information into the query.
Like the multi-channel approach in today's contact center, the best approach for social channels would also be to choose a few channels rather than one channel, and target different customer groups.
c) Define Social Media Engagement Process
Any social media customer engagement strategy will require active participation on social channels. In order to ensure active participation, there needs to be clarity on (1) Content Creation process and (2) the Social Participation policy.
Content Creation process involves deciding who creates the content that needs to be posted on social channels to respond and engage with customers. Should the PR teams be involved, or is Marketing supposed to take the lead if it is product specific, or should there be a separate team within the contact center that is empowered to respond to social media queries/issues? It is important to have a process that can deliver quick responses to these queries. While social media is not like a live voice call with a 2-5 minute response time, the expectation of response time on social channels would be within a day, if not a few hours (depending on the nature of the query; the process of screening mentioned above will also help determine the urgency of response). Including Training & Knowledge base for social media responses to help expedite the response process would also be critical.
Social Participation policy, similar to the content creation process, is about identifying who is authorized to post/participate on behalf of the enterprise - Is there a need to have a separate pool of empowered agents for this task or would the PR team be involved? The creation of a consistent social front for the enterprise i.e. a twitter account, facebook page, youtube channel, etc. would also be part of this process.
d) Participate - Listen, Screen & Engage
Once the social channels have been established, the next step is to participate in conversations. The recommendation here is to first listen to what are customers talking about, what are the negatives & positives, what products/services are in discussion, which customer segments are active, etc. Once we Listen to these conversations, the next step would be to Screen which conversations require participation - which customer segments, which negatives, which product/service areas, etc. After the screening process, comes the important step of Engaging with the customer. In order to Engage, the enterprise should be able to respond to comments directly, post messages on social networking sites, and provide a regularly updated blog/wiki for future references.
This process of Listen, Screen & Engage is being enabled by several emerging technologies that can be embedded into existing contact center environments of some leading vendors. The ability to have a queue of social media queries or cases, and being routed to available agents can be achieved by emerging technologies. However, as is the case with most innovations, the barrier is not the technology but the process.
e)Measure & Monitor
The last and very important step is measuring the impact of social interactions and monitoring the feedback, revenues or other target metrics. ROI for social media is a topic of high interest these days. Different enterprises enter social media for different reasons, and hence their approach to justify the time and resources is very different. Some ways of measuring success of a social media engagement strategy can be (i) measuring the extended customer reach & community (i.e. number of followers or fans), (ii) track increase in search engine volumes, (iii) track the success of promotions that are delivered via the social channels, (iv) track user comments to see shift in customer perception of the enterprise brand.
It is important to have a clear idea on the objectives so that one can work towards measuring & monitoring whether the objectives are being met or not. There are several free and paid tools available to monitor activity on social channels that can be used to help enterprise contact centers monitor social media customer engagement & interactions.
These building blocks will help define a clear strategy for social media engagement with customers. As enterprises embark on their very first journey of engaging with customers on social channels, one must be aware some of the challenges that exist today:-
1) Many Social Channels - There are many social channels, and hence the need to integrate the channels, and use different channels for different customer segments & functions. Focus on core social channels that are applicable to your customer base.
2) Half-Hearted Approach - There are quite a few enterprises who are embarking on social media customer engagement strategies only because "everyone else is on it". A half-hearted approach could have a severe backlash as well. Once a social channel for customer interaction has been established, quick response and frequent updates are critical to sustain the channel.
3) Silo-ed Approach to Social Media - Discussion of embarking on social media is happening by different teams within the same enterprise. The Marketing team, the Corporate Communications/Public Relations (PR) team, as well as the Customer Service/Contact Center team are all looking to experiment with social media. If this social channel is opened by any of these teams, it has an impact on the other team as well. Despite that, these teams are not actively talking to each other to bring forth a common social media strategy.
4) Early Days, Lack of Standards - Social media is a recent phenomena, and there are no standards that have been set in terms of technology or processes. Hence, one can expect some teething trouble for enterprises that embark on this journey.
Having a Social Media Customer engagement strategy will no longer be a choice in 2011-2012. Early adopters have already embarked on this journey in 2009. In the Asia Pacific region as well, enterprises have started to use social media to connect & engage with their customers. 2010 will definitely see more activity from enterprises to experiment with social channels, and by 2011-2012 one can expect best practices and standard technology applications to emerge that will drive the industry forward.
Building a Social Customer Engagement strategy is becoming increasingly important for enterprises, however, enterprises need to be wary of the challenges that come with a social media customer service channel. Social Customer Engagement is fairly new, and is unlike the other customer service processes where we have metrics, benchmarks and best practices to improve our processes. Including Social Media channels as part of the customer service process requires a thorough assessment of the customer base & existing customer contact processes, and the need to build a new set of processes & programs.
Key building blocks for a social media customer engagement strategy would include:-
a) Define Objectives
It is important to clearly state the objective for having a social media customer engagement strategy. Is it to disseminate information, engage with customers in conversations, pro-actively offer support or collaborate on ideas? Once we define the objectives, then the other aspects of the strategy can be explored.
b) Identify Social Channel
An assessment of the customer base and the objectives should define which social channels should be used. Different social channels serve different objectives. Twitter is good for broadcasting messages, promoting discount offers, and quick in-the-moment customer support. So Twitter is a good channel if you have a customer or partner community to broadcast pertinent information, and also respond to customer queries and conversations. Facebook on the other hand is better for customer collaboration and rich media sharing. If the objective is to engage with customers and collaborate with them on ideas, then a channel like Facebook is more apt. The option of creating your own social network or social platform for customers to communicate with one another & with the enterprise also serves the same objective. Using channels such as Youtube is good either in tech support environments where product demos, or troubleshooting videos can be shared. The objective in this case would be product support & training. Other social channels such as Wikis & Blogs are also effective, if the customer requires more deeper information into the query.
Like the multi-channel approach in today's contact center, the best approach for social channels would also be to choose a few channels rather than one channel, and target different customer groups.
c) Define Social Media Engagement Process
Any social media customer engagement strategy will require active participation on social channels. In order to ensure active participation, there needs to be clarity on (1) Content Creation process and (2) the Social Participation policy.
Content Creation process involves deciding who creates the content that needs to be posted on social channels to respond and engage with customers. Should the PR teams be involved, or is Marketing supposed to take the lead if it is product specific, or should there be a separate team within the contact center that is empowered to respond to social media queries/issues? It is important to have a process that can deliver quick responses to these queries. While social media is not like a live voice call with a 2-5 minute response time, the expectation of response time on social channels would be within a day, if not a few hours (depending on the nature of the query; the process of screening mentioned above will also help determine the urgency of response). Including Training & Knowledge base for social media responses to help expedite the response process would also be critical.
Social Participation policy, similar to the content creation process, is about identifying who is authorized to post/participate on behalf of the enterprise - Is there a need to have a separate pool of empowered agents for this task or would the PR team be involved? The creation of a consistent social front for the enterprise i.e. a twitter account, facebook page, youtube channel, etc. would also be part of this process.
d) Participate - Listen, Screen & Engage
Once the social channels have been established, the next step is to participate in conversations. The recommendation here is to first listen to what are customers talking about, what are the negatives & positives, what products/services are in discussion, which customer segments are active, etc. Once we Listen to these conversations, the next step would be to Screen which conversations require participation - which customer segments, which negatives, which product/service areas, etc. After the screening process, comes the important step of Engaging with the customer. In order to Engage, the enterprise should be able to respond to comments directly, post messages on social networking sites, and provide a regularly updated blog/wiki for future references.
This process of Listen, Screen & Engage is being enabled by several emerging technologies that can be embedded into existing contact center environments of some leading vendors. The ability to have a queue of social media queries or cases, and being routed to available agents can be achieved by emerging technologies. However, as is the case with most innovations, the barrier is not the technology but the process.
e)Measure & Monitor
The last and very important step is measuring the impact of social interactions and monitoring the feedback, revenues or other target metrics. ROI for social media is a topic of high interest these days. Different enterprises enter social media for different reasons, and hence their approach to justify the time and resources is very different. Some ways of measuring success of a social media engagement strategy can be (i) measuring the extended customer reach & community (i.e. number of followers or fans), (ii) track increase in search engine volumes, (iii) track the success of promotions that are delivered via the social channels, (iv) track user comments to see shift in customer perception of the enterprise brand.
It is important to have a clear idea on the objectives so that one can work towards measuring & monitoring whether the objectives are being met or not. There are several free and paid tools available to monitor activity on social channels that can be used to help enterprise contact centers monitor social media customer engagement & interactions.
These building blocks will help define a clear strategy for social media engagement with customers. As enterprises embark on their very first journey of engaging with customers on social channels, one must be aware some of the challenges that exist today:-
1) Many Social Channels - There are many social channels, and hence the need to integrate the channels, and use different channels for different customer segments & functions. Focus on core social channels that are applicable to your customer base.
2) Half-Hearted Approach - There are quite a few enterprises who are embarking on social media customer engagement strategies only because "everyone else is on it". A half-hearted approach could have a severe backlash as well. Once a social channel for customer interaction has been established, quick response and frequent updates are critical to sustain the channel.
3) Silo-ed Approach to Social Media - Discussion of embarking on social media is happening by different teams within the same enterprise. The Marketing team, the Corporate Communications/Public Relations (PR) team, as well as the Customer Service/Contact Center team are all looking to experiment with social media. If this social channel is opened by any of these teams, it has an impact on the other team as well. Despite that, these teams are not actively talking to each other to bring forth a common social media strategy.
4) Early Days, Lack of Standards - Social media is a recent phenomena, and there are no standards that have been set in terms of technology or processes. Hence, one can expect some teething trouble for enterprises that embark on this journey.
Having a Social Media Customer engagement strategy will no longer be a choice in 2011-2012. Early adopters have already embarked on this journey in 2009. In the Asia Pacific region as well, enterprises have started to use social media to connect & engage with their customers. 2010 will definitely see more activity from enterprises to experiment with social channels, and by 2011-2012 one can expect best practices and standard technology applications to emerge that will drive the industry forward.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Press 1 for Twitter, Press 2 for Facebook ...
Social Media has been a leading phenomena in the last 3-4 years. Facebook has grown from some 12 million users in 2006, to nearly 400 million in early 2010. Don't even try calculating the growth on that. Its BIG! There are lots of such data points that suggest that social media is beyond hype, and is becoming very much the manner in which people are interacting, communicating and participating on the web.
I discussed about Social Networking in the Enterprise in my previous blog post. Enterprise Social Networking is still in its infancy, and such solutions will need to pass the test of the CIO, the CFO and ofcourse time. But there is one aspect of social media & social networking that will and is increasingly being accepted by the Enterprise today - Using social media for customer engagement.
There are many definitions for social media, so let me add one more - Social media is an online platform for users to share, participate and engage in conversations (both monologues & dialogues) with friends, like-minded individuals and everybody else. With social media, it is as easy to create content, as it is to consume it.
Social Media brings about a distinct shift in the Customer service world. This shift is rooted in the definition stated above. In a traditional customer service environment, either the customer calls the contact center i.e. the customer gets in touch with the enterprise to complain, ask or notify or the contact center calls the customer i.e. the enterprise gets in touch the customer to notify, request/threaten or upsell. It is foolish to think that this communication is the only communication that a customer has about the enterprise. Before calling the contact center, most customers would either have "googled" the query, discussed with their peers (increasingly over the web), or shared their frustrations with the world (most likely on some form of social media). Imagine a frustrated passenger, who had to search for the lost baggage claim process on google, then ask his friends on facebook if they knew the call center number for lost baggage, and then tweeted about how bad his flight experience has been. After all this, he calls the contact center - the happy agent on the other end does not have the slighest clue what is coming his way when he picks up that call. Social Media changes this. Social Media enables enterprises to hear, engage and participate in customer conversations that are not happening only when the customer calls the contact center, but happening the other 90% of the time when the customer talks about your enterprise with friends, like-minded individuals or everybody else.
In today's social web world, neither does the customer need to get in touch with the enterprise, nor does the enterprise need to get in touch with the customer to hear the customer. The power of social media provides enterprises the ability to listen to customer conversations, and pro-actively offer support, way before the call reaches the contact center.
Social Media is on the rise in Asia. Of the top 30 countries with most Facebook users, 7 were from Asia Pacific (Australia, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore). Despite the growth, some enterprises in Asia & Worldwide are still questioning why social media is important for customer service. The popularity of "United Breaks Guitars" is a clear reminder of the impact that social media can have on the reputation and business of an organization. In the words of Jeff Bezos, customers now use the internet as a "mega phone" to tell everyone what they think about our product & services.
A Social Customer Engagement strategy can be beneficial in many ways to the contact center:-
a) Ability to provide Pro-active Customer Care, hence improve Customer Satisfaction
b) Connect with the customer using the channel they use most, similar to the principle used in the multi-channel approach with voice, email, web chat, etc.
c) Make customers your service agents, by getting customers to respond to customer queries on the social web
These benefits lead to a strong value proposition for the enterprise:-
a) Create customer communities to increase stickiness & loyalty
b) Monetize social channels to deliver promotions & targeted campaigns
c) Disseminate information to a wider or targeted audience in real-time & cost effective manner
Building a Social Customer Engagement strategy is becoming increasingly important for enterprises, however, enterprises need to be wary of the challenges that come with a social media customer service channel. Social Customer Engagement is fairly new, and is unlike the other customer service processes where we have metrics, benchmarks and best practices to improve our processes. Including Social Media channels as part of the customer service process requires a thorough assessment of the customer base & existing customer contact processes, and the need to build a new set of processes & programs.
More on the building blocks for a social media customer engagement strategy in my next post...
I discussed about Social Networking in the Enterprise in my previous blog post. Enterprise Social Networking is still in its infancy, and such solutions will need to pass the test of the CIO, the CFO and ofcourse time. But there is one aspect of social media & social networking that will and is increasingly being accepted by the Enterprise today - Using social media for customer engagement.
There are many definitions for social media, so let me add one more - Social media is an online platform for users to share, participate and engage in conversations (both monologues & dialogues) with friends, like-minded individuals and everybody else. With social media, it is as easy to create content, as it is to consume it.
Social Media brings about a distinct shift in the Customer service world. This shift is rooted in the definition stated above. In a traditional customer service environment, either the customer calls the contact center i.e. the customer gets in touch with the enterprise to complain, ask or notify or the contact center calls the customer i.e. the enterprise gets in touch the customer to notify, request/threaten or upsell. It is foolish to think that this communication is the only communication that a customer has about the enterprise. Before calling the contact center, most customers would either have "googled" the query, discussed with their peers (increasingly over the web), or shared their frustrations with the world (most likely on some form of social media). Imagine a frustrated passenger, who had to search for the lost baggage claim process on google, then ask his friends on facebook if they knew the call center number for lost baggage, and then tweeted about how bad his flight experience has been. After all this, he calls the contact center - the happy agent on the other end does not have the slighest clue what is coming his way when he picks up that call. Social Media changes this. Social Media enables enterprises to hear, engage and participate in customer conversations that are not happening only when the customer calls the contact center, but happening the other 90% of the time when the customer talks about your enterprise with friends, like-minded individuals or everybody else.
In today's social web world, neither does the customer need to get in touch with the enterprise, nor does the enterprise need to get in touch with the customer to hear the customer. The power of social media provides enterprises the ability to listen to customer conversations, and pro-actively offer support, way before the call reaches the contact center.
Social Media is on the rise in Asia. Of the top 30 countries with most Facebook users, 7 were from Asia Pacific (Australia, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore). Despite the growth, some enterprises in Asia & Worldwide are still questioning why social media is important for customer service. The popularity of "United Breaks Guitars" is a clear reminder of the impact that social media can have on the reputation and business of an organization. In the words of Jeff Bezos, customers now use the internet as a "mega phone" to tell everyone what they think about our product & services.
A Social Customer Engagement strategy can be beneficial in many ways to the contact center:-
a) Ability to provide Pro-active Customer Care, hence improve Customer Satisfaction
b) Connect with the customer using the channel they use most, similar to the principle used in the multi-channel approach with voice, email, web chat, etc.
c) Make customers your service agents, by getting customers to respond to customer queries on the social web
These benefits lead to a strong value proposition for the enterprise:-
a) Create customer communities to increase stickiness & loyalty
b) Monetize social channels to deliver promotions & targeted campaigns
c) Disseminate information to a wider or targeted audience in real-time & cost effective manner
Building a Social Customer Engagement strategy is becoming increasingly important for enterprises, however, enterprises need to be wary of the challenges that come with a social media customer service channel. Social Customer Engagement is fairly new, and is unlike the other customer service processes where we have metrics, benchmarks and best practices to improve our processes. Including Social Media channels as part of the customer service process requires a thorough assessment of the customer base & existing customer contact processes, and the need to build a new set of processes & programs.
More on the building blocks for a social media customer engagement strategy in my next post...
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