Why Using Social Media Within Your Contact Centre Is a Win–Win

If you haven’t adopted an omnichannel approach to customer engagement, you risk being left in the dust of contact centres that do.

Social media in the workplace is a tough nut. On the one hand it’s distracting – you pay your staff to work, after all – on the other, its worth as a communication channel is invaluable.

So, what’s the right answer? Unlike most tough nuts, it’s not complicated.

Why Using Your Contact Centre to Manage Social Media Is a Great Idea

Let’s face it, in today’s contact centres, omnichannel engagement is a must-have. Customers want an instant response and social media is often their first port of call. For this reason, it makes perfect sense for customer engagement to live within the scope of customer care.

Think about it. These agents are already trained, they know the business and they know your customers. And in the time it took to type that sentence, one of your customers has probably just tweeted you.

According to a report by Our Social Times, one third of customers who interact with brands online use these channels to complain. On top of this, one in three social media users prefers going online to making an actual phone call.

If that didn’t get your attention, here’s another statistic for you: 42% of Twitter users expect a response within one hour. Worse still, only 9% of brands deliver.

Forgetting the effect all these negative comments will have on your online reputation, failing to resolve online queries will take a heavy toll on your customer experience.

You just can’t afford to ignore social media.

How to Keep Track

So you’ve made the right choice. Now what? Well, just like any new strategy, you’ve got to implement it correctly.

Do you integrate social media into your existing framework or assign a new dedicated social team? Integration makes the most sense.

By incorporating the new channel, you’re essentially keeping all your customer engagement in one neat bundle. This will not only make tracking queries easier, but monitoring and reporting too.

There are various ways to do this, such as adding features to your current framework, investing in new cloud-based software or using a social-media engagement app such as Meltwater.

The advantages of going down any of these routes are numerous. You have complete control over the use of social media in your business (and rest assured, your agent isn’t playing Farmville with their cousin in Alabama); you can monitor the volume of queries; and you receive weekly or monthly reports.

Like we said in the title, it’s a win–win.

According to Deloitte’s 2017 Global Contact Center Survey, the importance of social media monitoring has increased as the customer experience becomes more crucial. Social media listening can can make up to 45% of captured customer feedback, next to surveys and call monitoring. It’s cheaper than tapping their phones.

So, stop worrying about how much time your agents are spending on Facebook. Rather worry that they’re not on it enough.