Shaun Han, Vice President, Applications, ASEAN, Oracle Corporation
By Shaun Han, Vice President, Applications, ASEAN, Oracle Corporation
In response to the rapidly increasing market competition, businesses today place substantial focus in delivering superior customer experience to differentiate themselves. Basically, customer experience is a sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings arising from interactions with a provider of goods or services. It is not limited to a single transaction, but driven by the sales and service lifecycle of the product or service — before, during and after the transaction.
To deliver the brand promise, retain customers and increase their lifetime value, more and more businesses today are actively seeking to enhance their customer experiences across all channels including the Web, mobile, social media, kiosks, and call centers. Poor customer experiences result when channels and processes remain in separate silos.
Social media is the newest communication channel in which companies today must integrate with their existing processes, technology and customer service channels.
Three Primary Capabilities for Social-enabled Customer Service
As the primary hub of customer interactions, the contact center is the most strategic nerve center of a customer experience strategy. To deliver consistent and relevant brand experiences across touch points and channels, a social-enabled and integrated contact center needs to be equipped with the following capabilities to build stronger relationships with customers via social interactions.
#1: Listen and Respond: Treat Social Media as an Integrated Interaction Channel
Most social-enabled contact centers are at the early adopter stage, attempting to “bolt on” social media as a side process. Many are experiencing inconsistent customer experiences, higher costs and negligible return on investments.
Effective social interaction within the contact center requires a systematic approach to engage in conversations occurring on social networks. To leverage fully the transformational promise of social media, companies need to empower customer-facing service employees with technologies that enable customer engagement across all channels, with the right answers, at the right time.
#2. Be Where Your Customers Are: Take Advantage of Facebook, Twitter, and Similar Services
Facebook has become an essential piece of any organization’s customer experience strategy. Organizations need to offer a full set of interaction options to which your customers are accustomed, including self-service, crowd (peer-to-peer) service and agent-assisted service.
The solution must leverage a common knowledge foundation to support workflow and escalation, community moderation tools, and reporting and analytics. All Facebook and other similar interactions should be captured in a common customer record alongside interactions from traditional channels.
#3. Build and Leverage Community: Connect to Your Customers and Growing Knowledge Processes
Customers are an extensive source of knowledge about companies’ products and services. In fact, some customers will have deeper knowledge than that of first-level agents. Companies can enable customers to help each other. However, if the customer “crowd” community does not answer a question in a reasonable amount of time, the thread should be routed to a contact center’s agent for resolution.
With a social-enabled contact center, social content and conversations are tied to the contact record and case management processes with integration points for the knowledgebase to enable the inclusion of community posts in corporate answers. Enabling the customers to help each other—and tie their answers and solutions into core operational processes—allows the organization to cut support costs and at the same time gain credible advocates amongst their customers.
In addition, to further unlock insights holistically across customer interaction channels, organization should unite, integrate and analyse all of the data in forms of internal and external, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured, to enable better business decisions. With the capabilities of information discovery and analysis, businesses can improve the relationship with their customers, get to the real root causes behind issues, and create new best practices through data analysis.
In a nutshell, we have now entered the ‘Age of the Customer’ where customers are making decisions that often bypass the employees and are interacting directly with their peers via social channels. Creating great customer experience starts with knowing exactly who your customers are, their needs, and providing the best recommendations based on their history with the company on record as well as what you have learned through their social presence. Customers today expect a consistent, relevant, and personalized experience, and therefore the companies’ internal applications and contact systems need to support it.
