Rate Limiting and Customer Service

Do rate limits matter? Twitter for example (as at publication date) limits any posting entity to 1000 tweets per day and 250 direct messages per day with even lower in hour limits.  For the average Twitter user these rates are absolutely fine; even a heavily tweeting account is typically sending less than 50 updates a day (based on the percentage of my own followers behaviour as a benchmark). I follow just over 1000 people (at time of publication) and of these only 37 of the people I follow tweet more than 50 times a day; anyway, I can tell for these prolific tweeters that they are using BOTS and Automation;

Of these 3.7% of the persona’s that I follow only 7 tweet more than 100 times a day. Only 2 tweet more than 200 times a day and only 1 tweets more than 300 times a day. As I tend not to follow Brands, but follow personalities that may themselves represent brands my own metrics are somewhat irrelevant.  Incedentally, I tweet 5.5 times a day.But what about a large brand, say @JetBlue with 1.7 Million followers?  What answer are you expecting?

I can almost guarantee that this figure surprises you! With 1.7 Million Followers did you expect more engagement? @JetBlue is quick to state on their own Twitter profile that they do not handle Customer Service enquiries on this account.  But, have a look at the next graphic.  What do you see?  Do you see the same thing I do?

I see an account that is engaging in customer service enquiries!  Now, at 8.6 Tweets a day they are just beginning their process of engagement in Customer Services; despite the Brands best efforts to encourage complainants to use a dedicated customer service area online at jetblue.com/speakup or by phoning in.  They don’t appear to be honouring their own account profile do they?  So, what are they doing?  They are training their audience!

Okay, so I think I’ve made the beginning of my point. Even extremely succesful online Brands like @JetBlue with a huge following don’t yet have to worry about being restricted on their outbound Tweets by Twitter because it is very early in their engagement journey.  Why? Because the 1000 tweets a day, a maximum of about 300 in any hour and 250 Direct Messages in any 24 hours isn’t going to be broken at their current engagement rates.  If they continue to teach their customers that complaints @jetblue are responded to I will argue that they are going to have a very big problem, very soon!

What about brands that are already directly engaged in Customer Service on Twitter? I’ll start the investigation with @Vodacom111 ; a dedicated and extremely hard working a talented team of social-engagers directly within Customer Services in Vodacom South Africa.

This is already 10 times as much engagement as we see from @JetBlue. These figures are averages of course.  In @JetBlue’s case, if we were to suffer, say, another Volcanic Ash Cloud, or in @Vodacom111 an incident like the infamous Blackberry Messenger Outage of September 2011 they will easily hit the glass ceiling of maximum Tweets per day.  On two occasions now, even with very small Social Media customer services teams I have seen them be rate limited.  On both those occasions it was just because of a traffic spike.

I’ll have a quick look at another Social Media in Customer Operations engager in the form of the Orange UK dedicated Customer Services Twitter account @orangehelpers, who are just as hard working and dedicated as Vodacom111;

This is again a high level of average daily engagement, and does not reflect spikes in engagement caused by an issue on the network as in our Blackberry Messenger failure.  With a little bit of Google searching it appears the current busiest outbound Tweeter is @FoxNews;

The problem with these figures is that they are averages over the entire lifetime of the account, and most accounts ramp-up over a period.  Using simple tools provided by Twitter Stats it is possible to extract detailed records of actual tweets per day going back about 6 months.  Let’s compare the actual current figures with the averages we’ve just explored.

@Jetblue – 6 month Tweet Rates

Does anyone else notice the spike in interactions around Hurricane IRENE in late August?  That alone clearly tripled the amount of outbound tweets from the main Brand account, despite the fact it isn’t used for Customer Service; apparently!

@Vodacom111 – 6 Month Tweet Rates

Even though Vodacom111 has got 7800 followers, roughly 218 times less than the following of @Jetblue they are already at the high watermark of around 130 tweets per day based on my adjudication of their stats. This is what I expect from a customer services team that are engaging with a few people on the front line. @Jetblue is still doing their 50 a day or so. But, as you saw earlier even @JetBlue is beginning to engage in Customer Service on their main account. Also, I see several spikes at about 250 tweets a day from the Vodacom111 team.  They are though still a very small and dedicated team of social engagers who aren’t yet fully engaged but they will be soon.  What happens when Vodacom customers begin to learn to engage?

@orangehelpers – 6 Month Tweet Rates

With @Orangehelpers we see a very similar engagement curve to @vodacom111. A steady increase in engagement and clear customer service spikes.  I can also see them hitting in excess of 350 tweets in a day based on a very specific event in early December 2011.  My guess is it was a traffic spike induced by a 15% price increase to all customers.  In early October we can see over a weeks worth of spike.  Anyone like to guess what that issue was?  Yes, it is the Blackberry Messenger failure.

@TMobileUKHelp – 6 Month Twitter Rates

The T-Mobile Customer Service team increased the size of their engagement team.  Anyone like to guess when?  We see the same traffic spike around the 15th of October due to the Blackberry Messenger failure. Another big spike on or around the 25th November. I wonder if that had anything to do with the new DROID launch?  This again, is a small, yet dedicated team of engagers.

What does this all point too?

My line of thought should now be obvious!  If I am a Brand and my Marketing Department is engaged in a social media strategy then I may tweet prolifically; perhaps using Automation and Bots to take content coming from the core of online and broadcasting it on Twitter. I suspect that this is how most INFORMATION streams find their way into Twitter.

But, what about Customer Service?  In some of the accounts that I have mentioned in this post Anana has deployed several key elements of their existing customer service capability.  The volume of customer interactions handled by these solutions in traditional channels like the “telephone” are mind-boggling.  We are talking about numbers in excess of 1 Billion customer service interactions a year.  The Interactive Voice Response system alone handles over 125,000 interactions a day! Don’t those numbers begin to cause a concern?  If our digital natives are keen to use social platforms to access Customer Service we need our social platforms to enable an according amount of interactions! Right?

If, as an industry, we are training our social media audience to engage in Customer Service enquiries on these platforms we have to acknowledge, understand and appreciate the underlying maximums!

Twitter allows 1000 tweets a day to be sent to it by an account.  That is absolutely adequate for the Marketing Department, who are extremely unlikely to be sending out more than 50 updates a day.  What about a dedicated customer services team using Twitter?  They are deliberately training their customers to engage in social channels.  Not because of it being marketed that way, but in pure realisation that the customers are approaching the main brand accounts with Customer Service enquiries.  The very fact that most organisations create tailored Customer Service Twitter handles is proof alone.  The blessing, right now, is that the amount of engagement when compared with regular customer service channels like “the telephone” are incredibly tiny!

I am extremely quick to point out to our customers when we take them on a social engagement in customer services journey that they recognise these limits and that they plan an engagement strategy that honours them.  It would be a complete failure, for example, for the customer services team to come online at 7am in the morning, and immediately start responding to the Tweets that come in overnight.  If they do this with abandon, they may actually very quickly become rate-limited by Twitter having been at work for the first hour!  Yes, you have 1000 tweets a day, but a maximum of about 300 in any hour!  Whoa!  That means, a Customer Services team on Twitter has to recognise not only the daily 24 hour limits, but within each hour too?  Yes, indeed!

Some of our customers adopted early strategies to ask the Tweeting customer to Follow them, and the Direct Message their account details so that the customer service team can look into the issue.  This WILL NOT SCALE! Of course, it cannot! At 250 direct messages a day the customer services team will have their hands tied!

This is a remarkably difficult situation to alleviate. For sure, I think Brands will put extremely heavy pressure on Twitter to allow rate limited accounts to be ‘whitelisted’. Without this happening there is absolutely no way that any brand can effectively engage in social media as a vehicle for customer service.  For now, they are doing it and getting away with it simply because we are all still training our customers to engage and the amount of traffic per day is typically much lower than the rate limits, and secondly, when we deploy technology, like Genesys Social Engagement into Customer Services we tune the solution so that we are only bringing in Tweets that are passing tests in 4 specific area’s;

• Actionable
• Classification
• Sentiment
• Social Influence

Actionability allows us to determine if there’s anything that can be done about the Tweet itself.  If the Tweet says “The Sky is Blue” then the actionability is LOW.  Classification is a technology form where we determine what the Tweet is about. By looking for particular keywords we can isolate the product or service being mentioned, and route it to the right team or skill.  We can also determine the sentiment in a range from NEGATIVE through NEUTRAL to POSITIVE.  Lastly, the social influence of the Tweeting party can be measured.  With these 4 factors at hand when a Tweet is offered to the customer services routing strategy we can begin the important task of establishing the business rules that will apply to each Tweet!

• Is it important enough for us to worry about?
• Did the complainant reach a big audience?
• If they reach a big audience what is their authority?
• What is the sentiment of the tweet like?
• What is the tweet about?
• Can we do anything about the Tweet?

By very carefully mixing these key factors we can define a Genesys Routing Strategy that ensures that the 1000 tweets a day budget, and the maximum of 300 an hour, and the 250 direct messages a day are spent carefully!

What is the impact of these limits on the Customer Experience?

My view is that customers will learn very quickly who gets engagement and who doesn’t! If the enterprise says that the @klout social influence score must be above 40 to qualify to receive a treatment how long do you think it will take for the customers to realise this?  If customers learn that the more profanity and charging they put into their sentiment the more likely it is they get a response what will be the impact?  The big dilemna is the customers themselves are not rate limited on the inbound side.

Let’s use @jetblue again for a use-case scenario – we have another Volcanic Ash Cloud sweep its way over North America, effectively grounding the airline. @jetblue has a fleet of 120 A320 aircraft (plus 70 or so smaller ones). Each one of these aircraft can house up to 120 passengers on typical loading.  That would be an immediately affected flying audience of 120×120 people.  That is 14,400 immediately affected passengers. Let’s assume that only 10% of these passengers are users of Twitter ( a low number, I know – its actually closer to 40% in America, but I’m taking a pessimistic view for illustration purposes).  That means that @JetBlue is prone to receiving an immediate flood of customer service enquiries from 1,440 travelling passengers, and hundreds of times more that number of enquiries from passengers indirectly affected by the disruption.  This is no small problem to have.  Now, if their social media strategy has trained the consumers that they will get a response in social media they have already created a huge problem!  I cannot engage with any more than 1000 of them anyway!  No number of additional staff manning the social media customer operation will help.  I can serve 500 customers a day with 2 tweets each!  Is that what Twitter is forcing us to consider?  I cannot have a conversation with someone about a customer care situation with 2 x 140 characters! I need more room!  I need more tweets! In emergencies, or periods of intense activity even small scale customer service and social media teams (and I’m talking about 3 or 4 people on duty) hit rate limits!  What do they do?  Down tools and wait for the hour to decay?  At tweet 999 of the day, have to tweet “Sorry folks, that our lot for the day!”.  This is an incredibly important problem folks!  Don’t you agree?

Summary

Perhaps Twitter needs to take a good long hard look at Customer Service and their platform.  My customers are buying quickly into the social media and customer service paradigm.  Right now, Facebook applies NO LIMITS to how often a brand posts on its wall, or the walls of its followers.  Twitter is a NO GO channel for deep customer engagement in customer service.  The limits are simply too low for it to work; even with careful tuning and adaptation of the routing strategy.  With only a handful of customer services representatives representing the brand in Customer Services dedicated accounts they are being rate limited.

A plea for your help and assistance!

If you are a Brand owner, and you care about your customer service and brand experience, please forward a copy of this post to Twitter citing your concerns.  As an industry we must approach Twitter and cause them to open the gates on restricted brands who are struggling to engage due to the limits with only 4 or 5 customer services representatives.  Twitter, your rate limits are fine for outbound Marketing engagement but they are too restrictive for customer engagement.  The Customer Service industry as a whole as that you understand this!  If you’d like us to use Twitter to engage, then we need to be able to do so!

Introduction

This post is a reflection on a Q&A conducted by Robert Bacal on the direction of Customer Service and where it is going this year. The original article is posted here. In the interests of healthy dialogue and debate on the themes raised in this article I couldn’t resist but countering them with our observations on the themes raised.

Question 1

Q: There’s been so much talk about how social media is changing customer service, and in particular a number of experts have suggested this will be the year of the customer — that customers will become way more powerful and that will result in much better customer service as companies realize the impact of poor service. What do you think?

Robert: First, I’ll say this. There are over 500 million Facebookers and similarly large totals of people on Twitter and LinkedIn. When you factor in what we’ve had for years, blogs, complaint sites and forums, and review sites like on amazon, what you have is way more than a year of  “social media” power. The outcome? Nothing. I see no numbers and no data to indicate that customer service has gotten better. In fact, the numbers suggest service is worse than before, something I’ve said over and over again.

Our View: We see Enterprises rapidly beginning the process of Social-Engagement. It starts naturally with their Marketing Teams engaging by BROADCAST of corporate value’s, offers, coupons, incentives and other ‘news’ on their own ‘instances or presence’ on each of the popular Social Media sites. This has evolved rapidly in this year to the actual physical marriage of Social Strategy as a marketing theme; into one where Social Media Interactions are being brought into Customer Operations and are being deployed on the front line.  Throughout this year we have conducted many workshops and discovery sessions with known brands (some global) who have keenly embraced the concept of Social-Engagement in the Enterprise Contact Centre. Our sales lifecycle on the realisation of these projects is weeks. Now, in markets where the deployment of Customer Care Solutions takes between 12 and 18 months these timeframes are unprecendented.  We now have Social Engagement customers active in projects in Europe and in Africa.  Our response to the comment “no data to indicate that customer service has gotten better” is we should be less quick to apportion the quality of customer service to the media or mode of interaction.  It matters not whether or not a customer decides to engage via SMS, Voice, eMail, Web-Chat or via new channels like Twitter and Facebook. The channel is arbitrary.  We agree however that the market is ‘young’ and it is a new paradigm. It will be a while before we see mature Customer Services Process and Policy and associated ‘measurement’ really proving out the case for Social Engagement.  One thing we are sure of though is social-media is here to stay.  The form of interaction or popularity of each social engine may change; but not the customers own willingness to use these channels to communicate with their peers and providers.

Question 2

Q: Could you clarify that last bit?

Robert: When you add additional customer service channels and you don’t put resources in (at a high cost) to staff them, what happens is that you spread your customer service resource THINNER. Thus in general service gets worse. It’s really simple. Companies aren’t willing to add to costs.

Our View: The answer is actually missing the key point!  If an Enterprise adds a channel of communication for Customer Operations and the traffic goes UP then it is a sure validation that they HAVE NOT BEEN LISTENING on that channel and are missing valuable opportunities to engage with the customer in the first place.  The answer poised is actually suggesting if we turn off all the channels we listen on to our customers we can reduce our costs by pretending that we don’t have much traffic!  This is a disasterous viewpoint!  Our view is that their is a BUBBLE of continual activity about any companies products, services or brand.  Imagine an inflated childs balloon.  This balloon represents all the traffic for the Enterprise Contact Centre with its existing channels.  One could somewhat argue that by allowing customers to engage with new or alternative channels that they will not make the same request twice by another channel.  The anology; Squeeze the balloon at one end (by constricting a channel, say eMail) and the voice traffic WILL GO UP; in other words the total volume of ‘interactions’ remains the same, but the means of communication will change.  The Anana view is that the Enterprise MUST BE LISTENING and engaging using the channels and media that its own customers prefer. Otherwise, the simple result is missed opportunities to INTERACT, to provide service, to excel in the customer experience.  If you are not listening you are doing no better than an Ostrich that puts ‘its head in the sand’ and pretends that the Lion standing behind it can no longer see it; as quite reasonably the Ostrich can no longer see the Lion!  At the end of the day their is a cost to serving customers.  The correct line of argument is that the right balance needs to be found between what SPEND will create which EXPERIENCE for the customer!  Spending frugally on telephony and customer service representatives will save money; but result in long wait-times for the callers.  Plain and simple!  Net result; loss of sales, poor customer experience, eroded loyalty, churn and migration to your competitor. So, back to the balloon analogy.  Your balloon needs to be big enough to offer the appropriate SERVICE LEVELS to all customers; irrespective of mode of communication. Period.

Question 3

Q: What about the claims of customer empowerment?

Robert: It’s bunk. The whole line of reasoning is based on a number of superficial assumptions that don’t hold true. For example, people are assuming that now that customers can express themselves in social media, that this will cause changes. Having an opinion, and sharing it online don’t mean anyone reads it, or is influenced by it. The result is that it appears there’s influence and power but there isn’t.

Our View: This is an incredibly dangerous viewpoint!  Suggesting that customers have no power to cause change is simply INCORRECT. Consider @DaveCarroll and his own story here - According to analysis conducted by the BBC this piece of social ‘commentary’ cost United Airlines $180 Million US Dollars!  (and that was only the effect on stock-price!).  I will ask Dave Carroll himself to respond to this one!  If I was an Enterprise and I heard the view from anyone that “Customer Empowerment” was Bunk then I would be very very concerned!

Question 4 – 6 are less argued so are not addressed in this response with the exception of “to have an impact requires collective effort by a large number of people”. Our view is that @DaveCarroll had a huge impact. He did this on his own; with limited support only from his immediate family. Social Media does not require the MASSED movement for change to happen.  The actions of a single VOICE (of a customer) with the appropriate message, and that little mix of the x-factor in their comment, concern or observation (like Dave’s Song) for that to become adopted by the MASSES; this is the viral nature of CROWD behaviour.  No one can forecast huge POSITIVE or NEGATIVE sentiment about anything or any subject in Social Media. Every time I post a tweet I wonder, like winning the lottery, if this TWEET is going to go viral?  Have I found the right mix of timing, sentiment, wording and CONTENT to trigger a revolution?  Maybe!  For my Enterprise customers I focus on making sure that they understand this RISK and the associated OPPORTUNITY. An opportunity to engage in Customer Operations with any customer in a service type of scenario is media agnostic.  So, my main message; start listening, start engaging, and do not do the Ostrich!

Using Social Influence to manipulate routing strategies?

We have been exploring the capabilities and business applicability of Genesys Social Engagement (GSE) for a while now in our Anana Briefing Centre.  For a recent demonstration and workshop we decided to extend the already impressive capabilities of GSE with our own extension, that allows the Genesys solution to dip into 3rd party SOCIAL INFLUENCE ecosystems as part of the business strategy.  To explore this theme a little, first of all a little background.

Backgrounder

As consumers embrace Social Media in all of its regional forms, for example, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn they develop ‘networks of relationships’ and connections.  A new user of these media will find themselves busy inviting friends, colleagues or even searching for people and organizations to associate with their account.  Over time, and assuming that they engage in social media relevantly the circle of INFLUENCE that they touch with their COMMENTARY grows.  If the user is a Celebrity they may actually have networks and connections that are very large in number within hours or days of first exposure!  But a pure measurement of the SIZE of their network only tells you a little about their INFLUENCE.  The nature of those connections is key!  The RELEVANCE and LIKELYHOOD of Amplification, LIKING, retweeting or COMMENTS about their social activity becomes the key.  In recent time, it has become popular SPORT for users of Social Media to WANT to measure their social reach.  You could for example on LinkedIn apply a tagline to your PROFILE highlighting your REACH by number of CONNECTIONS, e.g. Dave Tidwell (900+) and use that INFLUENCE to attract even further CONNECTIONS.  Several web services have surfaced that specialise in MINING the social-prowess of a user and prsenting the INFLUENCE in a meaningful way.  Two of these are KLOUT and PEERINDEX. (Please review them yourself and measure you own SOCIAL INFLUENCE! – that’s a great way to begin to understand the relevance of this information!)

Why does it matter?

Social Influence matters a LOT to Social Engagement tools and functions!  Why?  Because it is important to understand the PRIORITY of each user that you interact with.  Would you want to offend someone with 500,000 followers on Twitter and have them say something that assassinated your online character very quickly?  No, I didn’t think so!  The need to understand and relate to Social Influence has a direct BEARING on how you are likely to react to that person.  If they have limited social power, no connections and a weak network do you care so much if they say something negative about you?  No, you wouldn’t particularly care.  If they have a deep network, are socially RESPECTED with a wide coverage then you would be delighted if they said something positive about you!  Exactly the same paradigm affects the modern Enterprise.  So, Anana argues that it is important that if the Enterprise is engaged in Social Media activity, such as in our case with the deployment of Social Engagement within the confines of a call centre (or other customer services) it is absolutely vital that the member of staff interacting with a consumer in Social Media channels knows how IMPORTANT this consumer is from 2 key perspectives;

1. From the perspective of the Enterprise itself!
   How much does this consumer spend with us? What is their average revenue? Are they a VIP?
2. From the perspective of the Consumers world!
   How much ability does this consumer have to INFLUENCE? If they commented about your product or service how many people or organizations could be affected?

This is a key dilemna for the Enterprise!  Why?  Over time the Enterprise builds up an accurate picture to point (1) above through the consumers interactions and purchases.  Sometimes this is also achieved through BRACKETING or social DEMOGRAPHY.  But, let’s look at a typical use case.  You run a mobile telephone network.  You sell a phone to someone on a prepaid tariff.  To your Enterprise initially at least this is a LOW value transaction.  But what happens if that person has 1 Million Twitter followers?  According to your existing business logic this is a low priority account, and would be ROUTED by your Genesys platform in accordance with the defined strategy.  If the Genesys routing strategy was empowered to assess the SOCIAL INFLUENCE of this consumer you would probably decide to handle this customer very differently.  Why?  Because you specifically want this consumer to TWEET about your product and service in a POSITIVE light.  It’s really as simple as that!  Moreover, on the other hand, if someone casts a negative social commentary about your product with a HIGH SOCIAL INFLUENCE you want to offer a FAST resolution to their concern before any negative commentary goes viral!

Adding Influence to Genesys Social Engagement

Adding Influence to Social Engagement adds incredible value to the Customer Services Representative on the front-line! It is also remarkably efficient and effective. It simply requires that we obtained an API key, in this case from KLOUT (one of several options) and then use simple Web-Services to POLL for the score of each consumer that interacts within the Genesys Framework by applying the results of the influence lookup into the routing strategy.  The results of this influence score are immediately accessible to the ‘engine’ and can be used to PRIORITIZE the interaction, or to select the appropriate RESPONSE offerings that support the CSR during the conversation or interaction.

Here’s a pictorial expression of the capability.  First of all, I used my own Twitter Account (@dave_t_pilot) to cast a comment about the fictitious ABC Company that Tweets under the Account Name of ABC_anana.

A few seconds later Genesys Social Engagement picks up this Tweet based on the BUSINESS CONFIGURATION and hunts and routes the interaction to an available CSR. In this case it is being presented to ABCAGENT1. The CSR accepts this interaction by clicking on it, which opens the next picture below. If the CSR needs to check the SOCIAL INFLUENCE of this tweeting consumer then he/she simply needs to click on the Attached Data tab; where a huge range of information about this consumer is presented. Some of this comes from the INTERACTION HISTORY, some comes from the directory in the form of the CONTACT SERVER (UCS) and some is presented as a result of data-driven lookups. These lookups can be, as in the example in discussion in this article, lookups through web-services to KLOUT or PEERINDEX or any other form of backend in the Enterprise Data Field itself. The mash-up we created here for demonstration purposes clearly cites the 4 most popular KLOUT inputs that describe SOCIAL INFLUENCE.

Have a look in the attached data fields in the picture and you’ll clearly see the _klout_ scoring references!

Summary

This use-case scenario opens up a whole world of social influence based Genesys ROUTING design and logic.  Wouldn’t it be cool to determine TELEPHONE based routing strategies based on Social Influence too?  What about mixing Enterprise Data Driven Routing strategy, say the priority based on average revenue MIXED with the social influence, so that even if the consumer is of marginal priority to the current business rules they are prioritzed more HIGHLY as a result of their social prowess and influence?

My current understanding is Genesys aims to incorporate this social influence scoring within the confines of the shipping product capability set in the near future.  I certainly support this, and can validate already that it has the potential to be a key driving factor in ROUTING STRATEGY across all channels and media for Enteprises that power their Contact Centres with Genesys technology.  For me, this is the shape of things to come!

Genesys Social Engagement Engine is now active on the Anana Briefing Centre

This is the first forage for us in deliberate use of the Genesys Labs Social Engagement capability in our Briefing Centre.  The purpose of social engagement is to allow the Enterprise Contact Centre or Call Center to be able to move into Social Media as an active channel/media at the Agent Desktop level.  Typically, in many enterprises we talk to (at press around early 2011) nearly all enterprises have maturing Twitter and Facebook ‘Marketing’ functions; in other words, the Enterprise is spreading its own message on social-media channels, such as, advertizing and current deals etc

Now, that use of social-media for the enterprise is certainly a step in the right direction.  About 50% of companies are now recognizing that unless they embrace social-media that they will get left behind! Social Media in the Enterprise is not just about getting your own enterprise value proposition onto the social airwaves, but is about being conscious of what the social community is saying about YOUR product and YOUR brand and YOUR service!

To that end, Genesys has created a very interesting capability shipping under the banner of “Social Engagement’. In simple terms, social engagement allows the Genesys powered Contact Centre to ‘sniff’ the social-airwaves for commentary (public journalism) in social-media, and when certain business-rules are met to immediately take these social comments and present them to the next available customer service representative for immediate action, intervention, or re-scattering.  It is a simple concept, but it has profound impact on the Call Centre today that is still focussing 100% on inbound voice only!  I absolutely recognize that there is no small overhead in training and a lot of decisions to be made even moving from inbound voice (telephones) to the addition of other media that are not real-time like voice, say eMail inbound.  I’m not going to consider those questions yet.  Later on, sure!

So, we’ve deployed social-media Engagement on our Genesys 8 platform, and here’s our immediate view.  Firstly, the installation and configuration is in keeping with the Genesys model. It is very simple (like flying an aircraft) if you have done 3000 simple things in the right order at the right time!  Like flying an aircraft, as long as all prerequisites are met the deployment is matter of fact and routine.  Some time needs to be spent on dedicing what ‘configuration’ to deploy, with a lot of focus on the accounts or account names you wish to monitor, and the subsequent ‘sentiment scoring’ of the social-media ‘conversations’ that you are trapping for presentation to the CSR pool. As an experienced systems integrator we had no challenge integrating and rolling out Social Engagement, and we are ready to play!

So, we did it, nice and simply, by looking for base references to the ficticious company modelled as the Enterprise organization within the Anana Briefing Centre.  We called this company the ABC Company, and it has all the public and private trappings that any succesfull enterprise has! It has a 2000 seat call centre, a bustling web presence, and is already heavily engaged in inbound voice, outbound voice, inbound and outbound email, Instant Messaging and Web-Chat across the skills in its call centre.  We set the Social Engagement engine to monitor traffic on social-media referencing, naming, citing or otherwise targetting the ABCCompany.  The Genesys engine has been configured to initially check for TWEETS in the social-community every 60 seconds.  So, here we go, let’s do a tweet!

Paul did an innocent Tweet to the ‘ether’ stating his profound delight in the ABC Company, who had obviously dealt with him well!  Paul will normally have tweeted this out to his followers and thought nothing more about it.  He’d made his point, and could get on with other matters. His Social Commentary is complete…..well, so he thinks!

Little does Paul know that his little “Tweet” was gathered by the Genesys Social Engagement engine. It was then wrapped into the normal Genesys framework matrix of ROUTE and TARGET a resource in the Call Centre that is available, logged in, not in a busy state, and has the skills to handle this interaction channel.  The Tweet was tagged POSITIVE as a result of the keywords found within the CONTEXT, in this case simple words in sentiment, e.g. FANTASTIC.  So the two basic keys used by Genesys are the COMPANY Twitter ID, and the SCORE associated with SENTIMENT. 

I’m not going to discuss how actionable all tweets or posts are; but for now, only discuss the relevance of knowing what is BEING SAID about the Enterprise as the first stage in their journey with Social Engagement.  Here’s what our ABC Company agent immediately responded with in this case…

So, you get the idea. This TWEET is posted into the Genesys framework as another INTERACTION, and is routed, and distributed to the pool of available resources in exactly the same manner as a voice call, or an email, or a web-chat session.  Once an agent is targetted, they use their already very familiar desktop environment to offer an immediate comment, redress, remedy, or as in this case, a very simple positive RETWEET thereby distributing the POSITIVE SENTIMENT widely and IMMEDIATELY to the followers of their OWN account.  (Others too, as you can see I retweeted the ABC Company response!) So, in this case, the answer is positive, the sentiment is positive, and the outcome is positive.  You can see how easily a negative sentiment tweet can immediately be queued, treated, and handled in 60 seconds or less, nipping viral negative sentiment with redress and ACTION before things escalate.  Any social media user sounding off disquiet or unhappiness at their engagement will receive redress and positive handling, rapidly turning a negatively charged ‘interaction’ into one with a suitable positive outcome.  That really is the key, and the heart of Social Engagement!

Initial Findings Summary

In simple terms, had the ABC Company been a  real entity, and I was in charge of its markets and its customer relationships I would be absolutely delighted by the ability to capture sentiment on the airwaves and IMMEDIATELY deal with it.  It’s not good enough with real-time media like the social networks to deal with interventions, escalations, positive references or positive sentiments hours or even days after the fact.  The Viral nature of the social cloud is powerful, and if something BIG is going on, or has the CHANCE to become BIG, then as a business leader I want and need to know that my business is armed to defend, promote, attack and manage.  In a world where the Enterprise has zero control over public/social commentary it is critical that the front-line staff have the ability to engage in the battle, using the same weapons and armament of the masses.  I actually think that the addition of social media to the legacy channel of inbound voice is the most significat addition of any channel in the last 10 years.  Email, web-chat, co-browse and so on have important roles, but they are NOT as critical as getting your social media strategy right, and on the ball.  Well done Genesys, this is a brilliant start!  I’m really excited to work with our customers and clients on exploring what these capabilities mean to their plans.  Better still we can show them how in the ABC!

For a while now I have been talking widely on the theme of negative sentiment on social media channels and the dangers that it presents to the Enterprise.  As much an academic exercise as an exercise in futility I decided to test, at random, the potentially affected peer group for a single negative sentiment social media comment. 

I selected one at absolute random. I didn’t select it for any other reason other than it was first for a very simple Twitter search.  I simply did a real-time search for the term IVR to see if anyone was complaining about one currently. IVR is always a soft-target as there are so many bad ones that I knew I’d have no time finding someone annoyed with one!

This post was first in the list of many hundreds of posts. (You note I did not search for a negative keyword or hashtag; I simply searched for any Tweets with the term IVR in it somewhere).  Here’s the first post that caught my eye.

You can see that this is a typical complaint; well, not so much a complaint, but a statement with negative views on the situation.  Actually, this chap is thanking the IVR for its efficiency but pointing out that the subsequent wait for the Customer Services Representative was wholly inadequate.

I have no idea who this person is, but to test my assumptions I wanted to see how much ‘influence’ this post may have. First thing to think about is how relevant is the posters SOCIAL STATUS.  On Twitter a key pointer of social status is how many followers you have.  I was surprised. This chap has 1857 followers. He’s doing well!  Now, those less familiar with Twitter might just assume, well, his message may pass by the screens of 1857 people.  That’s not too bad!  Or is it?

Social Media works because simple messages can very quickly spread to massive groups of people. They go the so-called “Viral” stage.  To see damage this post might create for the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV always gets a hard time!) I wanted to see what the Tier 1 depth of the posters followers looked like.  I looked at his followers, and picked the first 20 at random.  Any 20 will have done.  I picked the first 20 just to illustrate the point.

So, for these first 20 followers, if each had retweeted (broadcast) the original tweet to THEIR followers how many people will have seen it? I did the math! The schocking answer is 63,023 people will have seen that post!  Remember, that is the TOTAL only for the first depth of followers and for the FIRST 20 only!  Remember, our poster has 1857 followers.

Now, you probably won’t agree with my assumptions; but I dare make the assumption that if I take the average number of followers per follower for the first 20; then within a rough order of magnitude that number will be somewhat reflective of the other 1837 followers I did’t track down to each of the 1857 followers to do a more accurate measure, I know, but I’m doing this as a blog post; not a thesis!  As a rule of thumb I think it will be okay.  Our posters average Following Followers depth at first level is 93 Followers per follower.  I could have picked another 20 in sample and had a different answer?  Probably!  Only Twitter can tell us what the actual depth per user is; and occasionally I have seen blanket stats.  They are not wildly differnet  from the raw 20 sample in this case (as an average).

Now the figures start to get frightening.  Our posters 1857 followers, had they done a simple ‘retweet’ of this negative statement will have reached an astounding 5,851,686 people.  Not bad, thats the entire population of a large Metropolitan city!  Hey, and remember, that was only the maximum exposure for a single Tweet from this poster being retweeted to the immediate followers.  I dare not figure out what a subsequent retweet potential audience might have; but it is huge.  There are roughly 170 Million Tweets posted per day. I wonder how many of them say something bad about your company?  Do you know?  Do you have a plan to find out?

I understand that not all followers retweet all messages they see crossing their client.  But, on some occasions they do; the ‘viral’ stage can occur sometimes, and it does regularly.

So, for once, rather than preach from on-high about the merits of social media sentiment monitoring I thought I’d explore a random tweet, from a random user, at a random time, and see just how many people could instantly have seen the fact he/she had a problem.  The answer was 5.8 Million people!  Now, thats a number worth worrying about!  Don’t you agree?

In the old days, if you really annoyed a customer, they may have told up to 9 people of their disquiet.  I don’t think that old marketeers rule of thumb really applies any more does it?

If you are running a call centre or a contact center, please think about how you can use these resources to address social media.  The impact of social-media is real-time; so is your call-centre.  The resources in your call centre are some of the most natural front-line resources to handle social media interactions.  Be aware of negative sentiment and offer immediate redress.  Have your audience retweeting positive experiences. The impact of positive redress and action is positive retweeting or Facebook posting.  This has a real and immediate impact on your business. Don’t let a “Negatweet” affect your Enterprise! [Word of the Day - Negatweet; A sudden, demoralizing burst of negative social sentiment from @acroll]

If you would like a demo of real-time social media and sentiment monitoring within the confines of an enterprise call centre with our Genesys Telecommunciations Labs Customer Interaction Management Platform then please contact me. I’d be happy to arrange it for you. It costs you nothing to explore; but everything if you get left behind.