Exploit Social Media - right here, right now
Social media are now the number one growth activity on the Web, so the time has never been better to exploit social media right here, right now.
For leading brands, up to 25% of content on the Web is now user generated. Groundswell , which is a bestselling social media book based on analysis by Forrester Research – makes it clear that customers, right now, are writing about your products on blogs; recutting your corporate videos on Youtube; redefining you on Wikipedia, and ganging up on you on Facebook. Groundswell states “These are all elements of a social phenomenon that has created a permanent shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as threat. You can see it as an opportunity”.
So the key strategic question is “Can you afford not to be interfacing with social media in support of your brand?” With the explosion of social media, the danger of dissatisfied customers posting negative comments regarding your products has never been higher. That risk is heightened in markets where there is little product support available. Therefore you could easily lose market share if you do not find novel ways to engage your customers.
Business Justification
Forward thinking businesses can now understand what customers are saying about them and their brand across social media communities. But one question consistently remains unanswered – what is the business justification for contact centres to divert some of their resources into communicating with these customers over the emerging Social Media channels?
The answer is that social media ROI requires both a specific goal plus a tracking mechanism – to understand what is, and what isn’t working towards meeting that goal. This should resonate with us all as contact centre people – as goals, KPIs and metrics are something that we are all very familiar with. Read how
contact centres can develop a compelling business case to listen and respond to what users are saying about your brand across Social Media.
Best practice
A good example of
a company that is harnessing Social Media is Unilever. Through its Careline, it offers a differentiated approach to Social Media – designed around the needs of the various brands. What this means for the contact centre is that the role varies from being proactive – for example engaging with the Marmite community that has developed on Facebook – alongside a more passive role for other brands and communities, for example monitoring but not engaging directly with the community members.
Through its engagement in Social Media, Unilever is clearly demonstrating all the elements of a joined up multi-channel strategy.
Using ProtoCall One’s “5C” social media contact framework, we can see evidence of:
- Contact Strategy – how Careline has integrated social media into the current ‘formal’ channels of web, telephone, email and white mail letters
- Customer demographics – with each brand understanding which social media sites its customers use – in particular the advocate customers whose views the business wants to understand
- Communications capability – how the organisation monitors and then moderates what is being said about its brands
- Control – where the contact centre applies clear guidelines that are then enforced by legal and compliance teams to remove unauthorised materials
- and Communities – allowing people to congregate and then discuss and share ideas about Unilever’s business area and interests?
A simple, but effective strategy – that many other contact centre operations could learn from.
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