Employee Engagement
Customer
Management
ANNO 1 - NUMERO 7
Novembre 2012
Perfomance Management Letizia Olivari
Da questo numero e per tutto il 2013 offriremo uno spazio di analisi e discussione dei principali temi che riguardano i contact center. La formula sarà sempre quella di un’analisi, che a seconda dell’argomento, darà una panoramica del dibattito e delle soluzioni a disposizione, seguita da una sorta di tavola rotonda virtuale composta con le aziende che liberamente vorranno partecipare rispondendo a due macro domande. Crediamo in questo modo di offrire la possibilità di aggiornarsi e di capire come il mercato si sta indirizzando nella risposta alle diverse esigenze. L’ambizione è quella di creare
SOCIAL TOOLS... CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS...
SOCIAL AGENT PROFILE... RESPONSE TIMES...
nel corso del prossimo anno un canale diretto di dialogo anche con voi lettori, attraverso i sito www.cmimagazine.it, il gruppo su Linkedin, la pagina di Facebook. Un’altra importante novità del 2013 sarà la pubblicazio-
ne di tutti gli articoli in italiano, con una selezione dei contenuti del nostro partner Usa e una maggiore integrazione tra i contenuti. Un motivo in più per continuare a seguirci!
Social Customer Care Consumers have embraced social media as a communication channel. Yet companies are not meeting response expectations. By Susan Hash
W
hen organizations offered new access points for customers in the past, their rollout strategies generally required a customer education component. Companies had to instruct their customers about the benefits of the new technology and how to use it. With social media, it’s the customers who are doing the teaching—and U.S. organizations are lagging behind their customers’ expectations. There is a considerable gap between consumers’ and
organizations’ adoption of social media as a communication channel. From the consumer’s point of view, social media is already a legitimate engagement channel, says Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, chief marketing officer for LiveOps. However, she adds, “the velocity of adoption of social media in the contact center is considerably slower than what we’re seeing in the population at large.” Nevertheless, customers’ expectations are high when trying to engage companies. In a recent cross- 29
Much has been written about millennials in the workplace, and how they differ so much from those who preceded them. In many of the writings, and in discussions with contact center managers, leaders often lament that today’s workers are less likely to be motivated by money, less likely to just accept given working conditions, less likely to “pay their dues” in order to position themselves for promotion. The undertone of these writings and conversations is usually one of frustration—management is a more difficult task when your staff seems so difficult to motivate. As a member of the baby boomer generation, I think we should change that tone from frustration to gratitude. Let’s assume for a minute that the characteristics attributed to millennials are at least partly correct. If so, that would certainly make it a bit easier to satisfy those in past generations than those entering the workforce now. And that is precisely the problem. Satisfaction sets the bar too low, and meeting this underwhelming goal gives us a false positive reading on the workplace. Measuring satisfaction might provide some guidance regarding future turnover, but it tells me nothing about interest, commitment or potential. To get to these more substantive characteristics, the focus must be on engagement. (See the sidebar on page 10 for more on 32 the differences between
Contact Center Technology Monitoring 37 We all use tools to monitor important elements of our personal world in ways that we never did before: GPS and text messaging on the kids’ phones, home security systems with remote notification and control, apps to follow activity with your favorite sports teams or stocks, and updates about your flights or financial accounts. Now you can-and need to-do the same things with your contact center technology. We have better tools and plenty of reasons to be tuned in to what’s happening and use the information to define actions to prevent issues or optimize going forward. A Little History Helps Define the Present In the past, companies didn’t need to monitor their contact center technology. We lived in a world of rocksolid reliability with fully redundant systems, automatic failover, and little downtime (planned or unplanned). Upgrades and other management and maintenance tasks were infrequent and handled with