Customer experience given a social aspect

Aspect Software have created Aspect Social, a cloud-based offering that aligns interactions organisations have with customers on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and online communities with their overall customer contact operations.

Companies can move beyond passive social channel monitoring and delivering ad hoc responses to empowering contact centre agents to act expertly in a disciplined, timely way on inquiries or comments in the social sphere or even to engage proactively with customers in anticipation of disruptive events such as power outages or travel delays.

“Most companies today simply monitor social media conversations on marketing campaigns or promotions on the social web, sometimes responding to them but more often ignoring them. However, as customers increasingly turn to social networks for customer service response and interaction, organisations need to embrace social media as a vital, two-way channel that can amplify their ability to deliver a differentiated customer experience,” says Jim Freeze, chief marketing officer of Aspect.

This alignment is something organisations are calling for, as 58% of customer service strategy decision makers see managing social media inquiries as their top challenge (according to a Forrester study, commissioned by Aspect, of enterprise customer service strategy decision makers), and just 4.6% say their ability to measure the overall impact of social media is excellent (according to Lithium and MarketingProfs “2012 State of Social Media Marketing Report”).

Aspect Social provides contact centres with the ability to identify, prioritise and route customer-service-related social media to the right contact centre agent and measure the effectiveness of their response. It provides tools and capabilities specific to the needs of contact centre agents and supervisors, including:

• Role-based User Interface – Includes specific features and access levels for agents, supervisors and managers, providing each workgroup within the contact centre with the tools necessary to create customer service excellence
• Automated Prioritisation and Matching – Use of patented algorithms that score posts for sentiment, relevance and action-ability.  Posts are then matched and auto-assigned to the most appropriate agent based on history and skill
• Advanced Conversation Management – Capability to follow a conversation thread rather than reacting to every post isolated from its context
• SLA-Based Metrics – Provides a way to establish and tack against social service level agreements (SLAs) such as customer satisfaction, handle times and resolution rates, so managers and supervisors have insight into KPIs
• Proactive Social Engagement – Capability to proactively inform social consumers of changes, outages or common solutions
• CRM Integration – Integration with CRM systems, knowledge bases and communities to give a more comprehensive view into the customer and provide agents with tools to provide a faster and smarter response

Jim Freeze

“In an era when consumers choose when, where and how they communicate, businesses have a unique opportunity to rally around the total customer experience by placing the contact centre at the heart of the customer engagement process. Aspect extends the contact centre’s history of disciplined, measured, customer-centric contact management to social media, turning social interactions into a meaningful, mutually beneficial dialogue,” adds Freeze.