Guest Post by Bhupender Singh, CEO of Intelenet® Global Services, says social media presents a new opportunity for call centre agents to interact with customers…

Businesses of all kinds are digitally transforming their operations to keep pace with the digital age. Traditionally, customer support in call centres is delivered by phone and email, but the growth in social media has led to an explosion of other customer support channels. Customers are opting for the less traditional forms of communication to interact with businesses, such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, Twitter and Wechat.

Business leaders need to ensure that they understand the importance of social media as it opens up the brand to the online world and offers direct access to customers.

Contact centres need to be able to manage traditional and newer support channels as part of their customer engagement strategy. Social media provides an even closer link to the customer and enhances the support offered to them by contact centres. Businesses need to integrate social media seamlessly because not only are customers increasingly using these platforms, but 74 per cent of customers expect a response within a hour.1

Dimension Data’s 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking report revealed that about 33 per cent of contact centres already offer web chat to their customers.2 The scope for digital interaction between customers and call centre employees has expanded across different channels, and businesses need to invest in the necessary IT infrastructure and platforms to monitor this.

Tracking customer engagement can be done by adopting a multi-channel management system which acts as a central hub to collate web engagement across various channels. Using one interface to manage multiple communication schemes makes it easier for a customer support agent to deliver excellent service. This will also give a holistic overview of customer activity across the channels to inform appropriate business action.

Monitoring customer engagement across channels will ease pressure on certain channels, significantly reducing queuing time and promote customer satisfaction with the service. Our I-ResolveTM CRM is a platform which accommodates different contact channels which businesses have available to them such as, Phone, Email, SMS, White Mail, Fax and Social Media. The tool instantly connects online engagement to the smartTALK agent desktop to encourage an appropriate response.

Along with investment in the right IT infrastructure and tools to monitor online engagement, business leaders need to direct their attention to contact centre agents by offering training on the tools that are available in order to effectively track customer engagement across all channels. Leading executives are now positioning their companies to achieve much higher levels of customer experience while reducing costs by implementing multichannel contact center strategies.

1 http://insights.magneticnorth.com/the-rise-of-social-media-in-the-modern-contact-centre
2 http://www.callcentre.co.uk/instant-messaging-for-customer-service-facebook-bots-and-being-channel-agnostic/