The New Social Contact Center by SCRM SCRM

Executive Dialogue Featuring Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. focus: Social

Contact Center

The New Social Contact Center Blending customer support with social outreach strategies in the universal queue can strengthen relationships and boost business. Martha Rogers, Ph.D. Recognized for more than a decade as one of the leading authorities on customer-focused relationship management strategies for business, Martha Rogers is an acclaimed author and a founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group. Martha has coauthored eight books with Don Peppers. Their newest book, Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, advances the concept of the customer base as a revenue-producing asset for businesses, capable of driving a company’s long-term economic worth.

ith hundreds of millions of consumers connected on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels, executives are finding that their enterprises need

to do more than simply have a social media presence. Customers are discussing experiences with brands and companies in conversations in their network, including problems or issues they might be having with a company’s products or services. These types of social media mentions provide companies opportunities to identify issues and reach out to customers proactively before a problem reaches the contact center. Meanwhile, a social contact center can enable companies to react quickly to negative comments made about their products or brands in blogs or social networks. In this 1to1 Executive Dialogue, industry thought leaders Martha Rogers, Ph.D., founding partner of Peppers and Rogers Group, and Heather Hurst, director of social media at inContact, discuss the reasons it makes sound economic sense for companies to blend social outreach strategies into their contact centers and best practices for getting started. They’ll also explore the wisdom of ”crowdsourcing” (i.e., support from customer communities) and share tips for identifying and training the right agents to provide customers with social support. Why does a social contact center make sense? Heather Hurst: Someone needs to be listening to the social conversation. Unlike phone calls

Heather Hurst As Director of Social Media at inContact, Heather drives all forms of communication, including media relations, analyst relations and social media. Heather has worked on both the corporate and agency sides of marketing and communications, for such companies as Digital Technology International, Basic Research and Blanchard Schaefer Advertising & Public Relations. She is a graduate of the University of Utah.

or email, we don’t have control over what customers and others are saying in social media. So whether or not your company has a social presence today, people are more than likely out there talking about your brand. This is especially true for consumer-facing businesses. It is essential to have a group assigned to respond to and be a part of the social conversation that’s happening around the brand, particularly because the majority of posts are being made about customer servicerelated issues, both positive and negative. Because the contact center is staffed and trained to take on those kinds of issues, it makes sense for customer agents to be on the front lines of communications with customers in social media interactions. Martha Rogers: It absolutely makes sense—nearly 70 percent of companies have increased their spending on social media, while a smaller percentage have increased their spending

Executive Dialogue Featuring Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. focus: Social

Contact Center

on search such as Google search terms. The reason for doing that is because that’s where the customers are. It’s important to recognize and reap the positive impact on customer value. Social networking presents new possibilities for dialog, so you’re going to get better collaboration between customers and companies. We also need to think about this whole idea of letting customers talk to us and to each other the way they want to. Social networking isn’t so much about getting people to talk to us through social networks. Instead, it’s a way of joining them in a conversation they’re having with each other.

What’s the business rationale for providing customers with proactive social support? Martha Rogers: This starts with understand-

ing why it is that relationships are good. If you’re my customer and I can get you to talk to me, and if I can remember what you tell me, then I can do something for you that my competitors can’t. We also can start to gather deeper insight about our customers’ preferences, needs, and behaviors through social media interactions, and so we should be able to improve service delivery, product features, and pricing based on these insights. That information will help us to improve the customer experience—and a better customer experience is how we increase sales and loyalty. There are also tremendous business benefits that companies are able to obtain from crowdsourcing, where a set of knowledeable customers handle inquiries from other customers. It helps the product and it helps a company by providing, in many cases, better service from one customer to another than from a customer agent who may have some training but

doesn’t have the same kind of experience with the product that another customer has. Not only does crowdsourcing reduce the number of calls and costs to the contact center, but it actually improves the information that customers are receiving. It’s really about increasing the buzz around the brand or a product or a service online. This not only increases awareness, but it also has the potential to genuinely

“The first thing you need to do is to listen. You need to hear what people are saying about your brand.”

—Heather Hurst, director of social media, inContact

increase sales. Social media buzz about your brand or products will also lead to improved search engine results, because social media mentions will drive a lot of traffic to websites. Customer recommendations have a great deal of influence in social networks, in online communities, and toward referrals in the offline world. There’s also a growing percentage of customers who won’t buy anything online until they see the opinions or the ratings of total strangers. In many cases, once there’s buzz about a product or a brand, then there’s often less selling effort and cost needed to promote it. Heather Hurst: I would absolutely echo what Martha said. The key message with proactive social support is that a company is putting the customer first, and it’s a way of informing a customer about something that they need before they ask for it. For example, Comcast will tweet about an outage before customers even begin calling into the contact center. This demonstrates to customers how important the customer experience is to Comcast, and it has really

elevated the perception of the brand in the minds of consumers.

What are the first steps companies should take to develop a social contact center? Heather Hurst: The first thing you need to

do is listen. You need to hear what people are saying about your brand and your industry. You also need to begin assessing whether you have the capability to engage at the social level. This includes determining which departments within your company are being touched by social media. Are these service issues? Do they represent sales opportunities? Are we talking about brand management issues? The next step is to determine your level of commitment. From the get go, you need to have buy-in and commitment to social media. You also need to work across all of the departments that social medial impacts and establish a gatekeeper group that focuses on the social conversations. As you’re monitoring and listening to the conversations, begin to assess whether certain trends have developed. For instance, are people asking about your company’s hours of operation? Are people saying that they’re in your location on foursquare? What are the types of things that people are asking about? Once you’ve established a gatekeeper, that group can start to respond to inquiries as needed, and they can also distribute social conversations to the various departments that are best suited to respond to them. Over time, just as with common requests that come into a call center, you’re going to build up your knowledgebase with the best types of responses to issues that arise in social conversations. For example, if a sales opportunity comes into a B2B company, that needs to be routed to the

Executive Dialogue Featuring Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. focus: Social

Contact Center

sales team and not responded to by the customer service department.

How can companies incorporate this type of support as part of their social media strategies?

store, standing in front of a dizzying array of mascara products and she is trying to decide which one is best. At that moment, she can access reviews about the product choices on her mobile device to help her figure out which one to put in her basket.

Heather Hurst: With social media, you have

both inbound and outbound communications. The outbound communications are typically overseen by the marketing department. That group disseminates posts such as notifications that your company just won an award, or that you have a sales special, or to encourage people to look at photos taken at an event yesterday. You need to blend the outbound communication with the inbound responses that you’re receiving through social channels. In order to make that happen, you need to get those departments talking to each other, to get them on the same page. It’s very much like having a direct response company running an ad about a new brand. As part of the communications process, they’ll engage with the contact center, show them the ad, explain the offer, and introduce them to any new products, much the same way the call center and the marketing department need to be aligned around the social messages they’re delivering. Martha Rogers: The right reason for engaging with customers in social media is because that’s where your customers are, and because they need help in a particular place. For example, Sephora is a big cosmetics chain. It realized that it needed to acquire new customers but keep their existing ones too. So it is pushing new ways to facilitate conversations among customers, while at the same time not letting go of some of the longstanding communication approaches that some of its other customers prefer. Let’s say a customer is in a Sephora

“The right reason for engaging with customers in social media is because that’s where your customers are.” —Martha Rogers, Ph.D., founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

How can companies identify the right customer agents to provide customers with proactive social support? Martha Rogers: Some agents are just very

good at helping people, no matter what the medium is. The agents who are good at figuring out how to provide the most help in the least amount of time using the fewest of the company’s resources, but providing the most robust solution for the customer, those are the people you need in these roles. When we start to look for these types of agents, we may need to approach this differently from the way we’ve recruited them in the past. Instead of recruiting an agent based on who’s going to be the hardest worker or who’s going to follow the rules the best or who’s going to get the most work done in an hour, we might want to recruit, evaluate, and reward them based on who provides the best customer experiences, who can provide the longest-term solution, or the agent whose solutions for customers get blogged about or tweeted the most. We may have to look for new and different ways to reward and evaluate that kind of success. Heather Hurst: One of the most critical

aspects of social media, whether you’re looking at a blog, Facebook, Twitter, or a forum, is that it’s highly visible to everybody. It’s visible to your competitors and to your CEO, whereas a phone call or an email from a customer might be isolated to a single interaction between the customer and the contact center. You need to find agents who have an understanding of social culture, agents who know the right way to respond to customers via the medium of their choice. They need to have good writing skills, so that when they make a post, it’s not going to be something you’ll be afraid to have the CEO see. Along that vein, we’ve seen that agents who are particularly adept at chat make excellent social media agents. These agents also need to be able to follow along with conversations. In my personal experience with call center support through Twitter, the conversation usually goes back and forth several times. Agents need to have the ability to track when a customer tells you that the shoes they purchased from your company fit fine and then they inform you two days later that the shoes have a crack in them and the customer is requesting your assistance to exchange them.

What are some recommended steps for training or familiarizing customer agents with social media tools? Heather Hurst: Our customers typically start

with people who are already involved in social media on a personal level and know the way that it works. Next, I would teach agents about the culture of social media, which is all about transparency, visibility, and being very open. This is critical to the way that agents should respond to customers. You also need to teach agents about your company culture. Is yours the type

Executive Dialogue Featuring Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. focus: Social

Contact Center

of company that responds in a friendly, conversational tone? Or does your company have more of a standoffish approach? I would also suggest having agents follow social conversations for a while to help them see the types of sentiments and issues they will be responding to. Then, ensure that you are making consistent responses to your customers. Because, again, you’re in a very visible place where customers can see what you said three weeks ago to someone with the same problem. Did you respond the same way in both instances?

What would you say are the top cultural barriers that need to be overcome to create a social contact center?

on a television or a refrigerator, the question you have to ask a customer is, “Would you like to buy the extended warranty? It will cost you this much for a three-year extension.” Many employees wouldn’t buy these warranties for themselves or their own families. And yet they feel as though they’re pressured into asking customers to do it. Think about the culture that grows out of a business like that.

“I would teach agents about the culture of social media, which is all about transparency, visibility, and being very open.” —Heather Hurst, director of social media, inContact

Martha Rogers: Like it or not, we are still

using the vestiges of the old mass marketing world. For any company that’s doing this, they’re really still living in a transactional age. And that’s a shame, because transactional marketing is the exact opposite of relationship management. If all I care about is how much money I’m going to make from a customer today, then I don’t really have to worry about what he thinks of our company in the future. And the exact opposite is true: If I care very much about what that customer thinks of me in the future, what he’s going to tell his friends, what they think of me before they’ve even had an experience with me, that’s going to affect our relationship going forward. We also need to think about how we treat customers and the message we’re sending to employees. For instance, extended warranties on appliances and electronics carry margins that are close to 100 percent. This means that they’re probably not a great deal for customers. And if that’s the case, then employees know it. Think of the signal this sends to employees, that before you close any deal

So the biggest barrier is making sure that all the decisions you make are decisions you wouldn’t mind making in public, literally in public. That the language that you use in your private meetings is language that you wouldn’t mind using if somebody were listening in and WikiLeaks published a transcript of what you said. The premium on transparency and trust may be the single greatest advocacy tool that we have for customers, and also the key to business success in the future. It’s certainly going to be the single greatest cultural shift that companies are going to face as they engage in social media. Social media is helping to provide empowerment to customers and total transparency from employees. Understanding that and being ready for this culturally is going to be very important. Heather Hurst: Martha made fantastic points about how social media really does demand transparency and openness. You see it in examples like in the days following the incident with JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater. After an alleged

assault by a passenger, he exited the plane using the emergency slide and became an instant media sensation. JetBlue has a really robust social media presence, and for a couple of days after that incident, you could see that its social media world was being run by attorneys, and by people who were highly sensitive to the incident. The community was outraged. They wanted JetBlue to poke fun at what had happened and to be open and tell the whole story. Obviously for legal reasons, it couldn’t do that, but the airline really came under fire for putting up those kinds of walls. Another cultural barrier involves the ongoing question of who owns social media in the enterprise. Breaking down organizational barriers and getting departments to work together on a social media strategy while developing a collaborative approach is key.

What steps can companies take to break down these organizational silos in order to provide customers with consistent support across departments or functions? Heather Hurst: One of the first steps is to

build a system of response to determine who the first-line responders for social media conversations are. And who then handles the second stage of discussions and how they receive those posts. That structure needs to be built across departments. Martha Rogers: It seems that the biggest problems are not the traditional product silos, but functional silos. In other words, it’s hardest for customers to get help between the billing people and the service people rather than between the products in this geographic region or another. This disconnect between functions and processes is what makes companies look disjointed to their customers.

Executive Dialogue Featuring Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. focus: Social

Contact Center

The real challenge is in determining how to provide support to customers in a way that actually transcends those functions in a meaningful and yet efficient manner. We can’t do this in such a way that costs spiral out of control. When you look at the companies that do this well, they are companies that place a high-level insistence on making it easy for people to be a customer. It should not be hard, it should not take extra time, and we should not be asking our customers to do a lot of work for us. We should not create a situation where an unhappy customer can tweet every 30 seconds about how bad things are. We should be making it work. If you are committed to that, then you’re going to start breaking down those boundaries in a way that works for customers.

How can companies prevent or diminish social media sabotage from dissatisfied customers? Martha Rogers: If you do the right thing

for all of your customers every day and make an effort to provide what they need and do it well, then when you genuinely screw up or when a dishonest person posts a complaint, your best customers will come to your aid. You can’t buy that kind of support. We can see those examples over and over. I’ll give you a prime example. Heather mentioned JetBlue. On Valentine’s Day in 2007, the Northeast U.S. was hit with an ice storm and JetBlue had to cancel dozens of flights out of JFK (John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York). To make matters worse, hundreds of passengers were stranded on the tarmac for hours. Passengers got out their cell phones and recorded it, and it was broadcast on CNN. This goes to those cultural issues we

were discussing before. David Neeleman, who was the CEO of JetBlue at the time, got all over the blogosphere, on TV, everywhere that he could within the next 24 hours and said, “We’re really sorry. We goofed.” He did not make one of those stupid namby-pamby apologies where an executive says, “Well, you have to understand that it wasn’t really our fault. The weather was so bad.”

“This disconnect between functions and processes is what makes companies look disjointed to their customers. ” —Martha Rogers, Ph.D., founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

He didn’t blame it on anybody else. He said, “We goofed, and we apologize to our passengers and we apologize to our associates”—I love that he apologized to his own employees—“and we shouldn’t have made life this hard for anybody. Here’s what we’ve done to fix it. This is why it will never happen again. Please come back and give us a chance.” At that point, JetBlue had done all that it could do. It had given out free trips. It came out with a customer bill of rights and made other fixes to its processes. Yet, for days afterward there was still a lot of complaining out there in the blogosphere. The people that came to JetBlue’s rescue were the only ones with any real credibility at that point: its most frequent flyers. They got into the blogosphere and told others who were complaining, “Hey, guys, OK, so they goofed. They had a bad day, but they are better than most airlines out there. Listen, come back. They’ll be all right.” You can’t buy that kind of support. That is how you solve it: Day after day, you have a great product; you have great service; you offer top experience; you pay

attention to the problems and solve them when they arise; and you do the right thing for your customers. If you do that, then that is the best way to solve real and fabricated problems. Heather Hurst: Another part of the social culture is that you never delete a post. If somebody posts something negative about you, then it stays up and never comes down. Going back to what we have already talked about—transparency—it is extremely important in the social culture to be very open and transparent. One thing that a lot of companies do, especially to protect customer privacy, is to take a discussion offline. It doesn’t have to be hashed out in social media for public consumption. Doing so can also be detrimental to the company.

What are some examples of companies that are doing this well today? What is it about their approach that’s helping them to be successful? Heather Hurst: I don’t think you can have a

social media discussion without including the cable company Comcast. From a publicity and buzz angle, they’ve really elevated social media, especially Twitter, as a vehicle for customer service. They still have an uphill battle to climb in terms of making people love them, but I think they have done a tremendous job in responding to issues and being both proactive and responsive. Comcast is doing a lot to change the perception of their brand. They’ve gone from being a company that had a customer service tech fall asleep on a woman’s couch, only to have the video end up on YouTube, to being a brand with a Twitter handle of “ComcastCares” that people are responding to and praising. Another company that bears mention is Zappos. I posted on Twitter a while ago

Executive Dialogue Featuring Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. focus: Social

Contact Center

when I got a pair of shoes from Zappos about how great my experience was with the company. I was happy about how quickly the shoes came and that they made it really easy for me to exchange them later. They reached out to me and made me a VIP customer, and this was all in response to a really positive post that I put out there. But the point is, they acknowledged it, and they do it with everybody. They’re incredibly proactive. I’ll also bring up Best Buy. Best Buy not only uses Twitter, but they are also a very active participant in forums because the products they sell are highly technical,

which involves the community and makes crowdsourcing a big element of their social offering. Best Buy provides a lot of vehicles for customers to receive support for their products. Martha Rogers: Barnes & Noble made it possible for customers to discuss books through online forums. That helps them to support online and store-based book sales, and that just facilitates a virtuous circle of selectivity. There’s a candy bar produced by Cadbury Schweppes called Wispa. Cadbury was going to eliminate this candy bar in 2007, but then some 14,000 customers

“It benefits all parties when we can find this kind of brand loyalty.” —Martha Rogers, Ph.D., founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

banded together on Facebook and MySpace and demanded that the product be continued, and it was. It benefits all parties when we can find this kind of brand loyalty and ways of communicating and learning from one another. n

inContact helps contact centers around the globe create profitable customer experiences through its powerful portfolio of cloud-based contact center software solutions. The company’s services and solutions enable contact centers to operate more efficiently, optimize the cost and quality of every customer interaction, create new pathways to profit and ensure ongoing customer-centric business improvement and growth. For more information visit www.inContact.com.

Peppers & Rogers Group is dedicated to helping its clients improve business performance by acquiring, retaining, and growing profitable customers. As products become commodities and globalization picks up speed, customers have become the scarcest resource in business. They hold the keys to higher profit today and stronger enterprise value tomorrow. We help clients achieve these goals by building the right relationships with the right customers over the right channels. We earn our keep by solving the business problems of our clients. By delivering a superior 1to1 Strategy, we remove the operational and organizational barriers that stand in the way of profitable customer relationships. We show clients where to focus customer-facing resources to improve the performance of their marketing, sales, and service initiatives. For more information, please visit: www.peppersandrogersgroup.com.