A new concept arises from the union between Contact Centers and Social Media: The Social Contact Center. Below we discuss the key aspects of this new way of understanding customer service. Keep reading! ??
A good customer service through different channels is one of the key factors for the success of a brand. Although we have already addressed the importance of the Digital Customer Experience, today we will focus on Contact Centers and their key aspects.
With the widespread use of social networks and other online channels, consumers are empowered: if they are dissatisfied with a company’s product or service, all they need to do is write a tweet or a bad review. And, in the worst cases, this social media manifestation could sink a brand’s reputation. This is why, to avoid reaching such an extreme, it is essential that every company has tools to optimize its multi-channel customer service and that it includes, of course, customer service in Social Media.
This is where the already well-known Contact Centers come from, which should not be confused with Call Centers: their activity, although they may have some similarities, there is a fundamental difference.
Contact Centers VS. Call Centers
Whilst a Call Centre bases its activity on attending to customers’ requests or services by telephone, a Contact Centre is committed to omnicanality as it manages different customer service channels (chat, email, social networks, instant messaging… as well as telephone).
Therefore, we could say that the activity of a Call Center is included within a Contact Center or, simply, that the last one is the logical evolution of the traditional telephone centers. In addition, Contact Centers are usually integrated into the management strategy of CRMs (Customer Relationship Managers), in which customer or potential customer data and their conversational history are stored.
One step further: The Social Contact Centers
At this point, there is no longer any doubt that customer service and social networks are destined to go hand in hand. Every brand must pay attention to what their customers or potential customers can say, ask, request, and so on in Social Media and, most importantly, take action on it!
From this need arises the concept of Social Contact Center, which is the evolution of Contact Centers towards complete integration with Social Listening tools and technology or listening in social networks. Here are some of its key aspects:
- OMNICANALITY AND INTEGRATION WITH ALL CHANNELS: When we say all, we do not fall short. We mean having all social networks integrated (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, etc.) along with other channels such as email or web contact form or real time channels such as calls, web chats, or even messaging! (WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger…). In fact, the big differentiation when managing a contact center is whether it is real time (chat, whatsapp, phone) or not (email, web form or RRSS).
- CUSTOMER SERVICE… TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL! A Social Contact Center will allow you to see a customer’s history, that is, all public and private interactions with the customer in a single thread of conversation ordered by criteria such as age.
- INTEGRAL RESPONSE MANAGEMENT: In addition to collecting consumer feedback, the Social Contact Center (such as Zendesk) makes possible the automation of responses, the manual assignment of tickets to agents and has its own super-customizable CRM without touching code.
- EXTERNAL LISTENING: In addition to the omnicanality of the brand’s own channels, there are countless spaces on the Internet in which to criticize or boast about a brand: blogs, forums, news, reviews on Google, Amazon, Trip Advisor, Apple Store. All of this can have an impact not only on the reputation of a brand but also on product sales directly at the online point of sale. Therefore, why not leave it in the hands of a professional customer service? Thanks to the integration between Social Listening and ticketing systems, this is already a reality today.
At this point, you may be wondering why we are involved in all this…
As a Social Listening and Natural Language Processing tool, we can facilitate the transition of your Call Center into a updated Contact Center. Not only can we connect your ticketing system to your own channels in Social Media or to external channels by free search of terms (brand, product, collective,…) but we can add all the robotization of automated processes to your customer service flow to reduce costs and time. We show some examples:
- Sentiment: we can label the sentiment in order to automate the SLAs according to the criticality of the tickets.
- Categorization: we can detect that the ticket is about billing and automate that it is received directly by the billing department. We avoid the typical “delivery agent” and speed up response times.
- Influence: we can add the number of followers in the ticket so that those with more influence have a shorter SLA and can therefore do more damage to the brand.
If you want to know more details about integrations with ticketing systems like Zendesk, do not miss this post ?