Social media is an opportunity for contact centres to get it right

According to new research, 65 per cent of people say that social media is a better way to communicate with companies than call centres.

However, responds Mark King, Senior VP Northern Europe & Africa at Aspect, the research highlights that the way we prefer to engage with organisations is changing, and this is an opportunity rather than the death knell for the contact centre.

The study from Fishburn Hedges and Echo Research also found that the number of customers engaging with brands through social media doubled from 19% to 38% in just the last eight months.

“Whilst we do know that for a growing number of people, social media is a very convenient channel to communicate with our peers, the research does not highlight how effective organisations’ social media strategies are,” says King. “It is very easy to get carried away by hype, but without a carefully considered set of processes, it can end up working as a separate entity having no real link with other channels. The natural home for social media is in the contact centre, as part of a unified, multi-channel strategy.”

He continues: “Some people still prefer to call an organisation, and preferences depending on the nature of the interaction will always dictate the method of contact. Social media needs to be a cog in the wheel, turning social media engagements into productive customer dialogues that create a positive experience and deliver significant business value.

“One key benefit of social media is that it could also help with call avoidance strategies; the cost per interaction is very low and it can broadcast to a number of people at once. For example, a utilities company could alert its followers to an outage very easily and quickly, deflecting a number of calls that might otherwise have come into the business,” King says.