Contact Centre: Enabling your business through social media

Customers expect to receive exceptional service and assistance through all social media channels. Simply having a social media presence is only one part of a strategy.  Organisations need to plan for proactively reaching customers online and integrating social media into their everyday duties.

Businesses effectively communicate with present and potential customers through social channels by using an omnichannel contact centre to engage across platforms.

We’ll review the importance of social and lay out the easy steps to effectively integrate your plans for seamless customer engagement.

• Global social media usage is anticipated to reach 4.89 billion people by 2023.
• Every month, we switch between up to seven social networks.
• Internet users now spend an average of 151 minutes a day on social media, more than ever before.
• Just 3% YoY growth in social media users occurred between January 2022 and January 2023 (+137 million users).

Benefit

Social media contact centres give businesses the opportunity to interact with clients instantaneously, enhancing their brand recognition and building loyalty. 46.7 percent of respondents to a Conversocial study stated that getting a tailored answer from a brand would increase their likelihood of repeat usage.

Organisations learn how to enhance their products and services by understanding how the market is evolving on social. This is thanks to the richness of consumer preference insights and data provided by social media channels.

Leveraging social media into the Contact Centre Employee Experience:

When employers provide contact centre agents with the tools they need to support the best possible customer service, contact centre agents flourish and report higher levels of job satisfaction and engagement.

Increasingly this requires having faith in frontline service representatives to respond to clients across all channels. Giving the agents control over social media reduces the possibility that customers will complain about how bad your social media presence is.

Having an overall perspective of interactions saves unnecessary back-and-forth between employees and customers. As a result, both your marketing and customer service agents will meet their objectives.

Moreover, the addition of social media to a contact centre gives greater opportunities for professional advancement as agents who start out on the phones but have a creative flair or a passion for writing can transfer their skills by joining the social media team support.

This can also boost employee retention and engagement, thus better career prospects in an industry with historically high turnover rates.

Leveraging social media into the Customer Experience:

As more customers are directly contacting brands on social media – several studies show that the customer experience increases when the contact centre at least takes part in social media management.

We know that it may be tempting to regard social as a channel only for marketing, delegating to Marketing departments until your team determines who might best own social media.

Whether social media is managed by the marketing team, is outsourced to your contact centre, or all of the above, it is crucial to ensure that anyone engaging with your customers on social media does so in a consistent manner. Here’s why:

• Social media response times have decreased when in the hands of contact centre agents and their teams because they are staffed to answer clients as soon as enquiries arrive.
• If necessary, customer service teams can escalate issues to other channels or departments. Whilst most customers dislike switching between channels, they dislike repetition even less. Businesses can reduce the number of times customers have to repeat themselves in order to get their concerns resolved by keeping support tickets in the same department.

ROI:

Contact centres may leverage social media in a number of useful ways to divert traffic to other service channels, saving both time and money.

To do this, they can use private messenger video conversations to put people at ease and go over the necessary step-by-step instructions. In addition to direct communication, the team can frequently publish short advice and video tutorials on their social media platforms.

As a result, businesses will see higher income, higher customer happiness, and decreased volume in other service channels.

Creating a comprehensive guideline will act as a structure and direction for your team’s social media support stance and procedures:

• Standard response times
• Established support channels
• Tone of voice, hours of assistance, contacts for crisis communications, key stakeholders for escalation

You don’t have to reply to every single post mentioning your company, but you should visibly address customer complaints. By addressing any difficulties publicly, your organisation will position itself as a leader in providing excellent customer service.

Consider giving these communications priority:

• Technical issues
• Gratitude
• Important Requests
• Q&A

Brook Street is here to help you:

It is vital to understand your target market to use your presence wherever it matters most to your clients. By understanding which channels they prefer to utilise to contact you, you can prioritise the right social platform to use.

Here at Brook Street, we welcome the opportunity to speak through your specific challenges and requirements. We work with clients to identify skills needed for contact centres today, and how you can improve your processes to utilise the latest technological offerings.