If you have never seen this web page http://twitter.zappos.com/ – you should! With legions of Twitter-ers on staff – 432 to be exact – Zappos make customer service look: easy, decentralized, and inexpensive. But that begs the question – what impact will Twitter have on today’s customer contact centers?
History would tell us that just like the days when ATM’s were first being rolled out and people were declaring that the bank teller was soon to be extinct, that this never really materialized fully. In fact quite the opposite was true …. banks ended up building more physical locations and support both channels! Channels yield choices!
So does that mean for every new channel that gets launched we need a separate grouping of customer service reps to handle it in our Contact Centers? Maybe not …. but a certainly a portion of Contact Center experts can and should be trained in responding real time with Twitter.
Progressive companies are learning to integrate social interaction technologies to monitor brands today in real-time. It’s quite early in it’s use, but social technologies will continue to drive their way into brand management over the next 2 years and become a core part of companies overall strategy when it comes to Contact Centers. At least successful ones for sure!
Twitter will be another feed along with IM and Email into a Contact Center (support questions may even be crowdsourced by non-CC employees) and will be one more channel that agents will have to deal with. Much like chat and SMS the era of communications becoming more and more synchronous is upon us. And the race is on for how fast you can respond to your customers needs.
Tags: Twitter
Interesting post, Paul. This will underscore the need to know abbreviated texting language as consumers explain their issues in 140 characters!
A good post Paul.
To build on some of your points:
1. On a broader scale, social media are the new channel for contact centers. Twitter, blogs, wikis, social networks etc are all prime channels for contact centers to exceed customer expectations.
2. Because of their transparent and authentic nature, social media present a new opportunity for contact centers. For Zappos, their open air customer service has built the brand. Even when Zappos uses IM, the chat session found its way public on a blog: http://bit.ly/dLloE
3. Although many contact center staff may be proficient at chat, they may be ill prepared to address questions in a public forum. The role of a contact center professional will need be augmented with training similar to those elsewhere in the company who participate in social media.