Social Media is the customer’s voice and your agents’ ears. But are you able to tame this powerful engagement channel – rather than letting it spin out of control? Now it’s possible.

As everyone knows, Social Media is an infamous time-waster, with so much meaningless chatter on so many channels. It’s natural for efficiency-driven organisations to give it all a wide berth, apart from letting their marketing departments dip in to support campaigns.

However, if you’re not watching closely enough then Social Media can turn toxic fast. According to research shared by ICMI, 31% of people will post online after they have had a bad contact centre experience[1]. Spectacular rants get shared and snowball. But if you intervene quickly, you can often nip issues in the bud.

Social Media can work in your favour too. If your competitors are coming unstuck, it’s good to know what’s happening and when. After all, you might want to reach out quickly to their disappointed customers with tempting offers. Timing is everything.

Ignoring Social Media isn’t an option

Attempting to remove yourself from Social Media means losing out financially. That’s because 87% of consumers claim their brand loyalty is affected by whether or not a company will respond via their preferred Social Media or communications channel[2].

What’s more, just over one third of consumers (34.5%) say Social Media is their first choice of contact, so it must be part of any serious customer engagement strategy. And even if you shut down your Social Media channels, the reality is that people will still talk about you anyway just somewhere else.

The big question is: How can you do the seemingly impossible … keep on top of Social Media without employing an army of agents to monitor everything, 24/7?

Eckoh has found a way.

Picking out what matters

Eckoh’s Social Media monitoring solution lets you cut through the noise. It highlights everything spoken about your brand, listening out on across Social Media, news sites, blogs, and reviews … in 160 languages. The findings are presented in real-time, so you can monitor what people are saying.

You might be talked about more than you realise. For example, Eckoh revealed that one of its customers the NHS Blood Transfusion service received over 250,000 mentions a month from 12 streams.

But what do you do with this kind of data?

With the right tools, you can get business insights and discover more about your market and its customers. You can uncover trends, follow relevant debates and identify influencers and their demographics. It’s possible to stick with what’s relevant, thanks to the best text analytics software in the industry, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning.

Meanwhile, Eckoh’s Social Media Agent gives you extra tools to intervene in powerful ways. When brand names and keywords get mentioned, the system creates live tickets for your agents. Your team can reply or tweet directly from the same console. Template responses are available too, so agents always stay ‘on brand’ with their messages.

It’s worth it

Although Social Media intervention is often seen as damage limitation, there’s a big upside. Research found that 71% of consumers who have had a good Social Media experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others[3].

With the right tools, you can reply quickly and play to the strengths of each Social Media platform too responding in the most appropriate way for their users. For example, 90% of Instagram users are under 35[4]. Meanwhile, more than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices, according to YouTube’s own stats. You can be nuanced in how you respond.

And when one channel grows in popularity and another fades, you just follow the conversations, wherever they happen.

Get answers – fast

Social Media tools are a powerful new weapon for contact centres who want to take customer relationships to the next level. There are other helpful solutions too. Discover them all by downloading your free copy of the Customer Engagement eGuide. You’ll get expert insights into how to drive up customer satisfaction, boost sales and increase profitability.

To find out more about Eckoh Social Media Agent and other tools available via the Eckoh Experience Portal that can enhance your contact centre why not give us a call on 01442 458460 or email us at tellmemore@eckoh.com.