Anana is really proud to have delivered 3 of the most prominent Genesys eServices Social Media enabled contact centre solutions anywhere in the European and African region over the last year or so. These include T-Mobile, Orange and Vodacom. We are also working on several others concurrently which are not quite ready for public attention! (More on these later!).

A very early requirement in these initial shipping releases was the ability of the customer services representative to originate new interactions to the customer over social media channels without requiring an existing OPEN interaction to respond against.

Anana’s first deliverable was a functional extension for Twitter Originate for Genesyslab 8.1 version on the Genesys Agent Desktop. This was then rewritten and rebuilt as a custom module for Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1.200.xxx as described in video demo here in an earlier post.

We are now working quickly on another custom module for the Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1 or higher releases that see’s the same underlying functionality and capability being extended to Facebook. This will allow the Customer Services Representative to create a new POST on the WALL or to add a new parent COMMENT to an existing topic thread in the absence of a parent interaction from an existing customer.

Whilst working quickly to realise these new functional capabilities within Genesys Social Engagement and the Social Messaging Server we work closely with Genesys Product Management and Engineering to effect the disclosure of the features and functions created so that they may be returned to the generic mainstream shipping products over time.

2011 has been a fantastic year for the Anana team. We have met all of our internal and external targets on all fronts. I couldn’t be happier! 2011 has been a year of incredible innovation and execution. In preparing ourselves to continue our activities into next year I thought I’d take a moment to capture the key-highlights of our year. Also, perhaps, the activities that have driven us through 2011 and a solid pointer into the momentum for 2012. I’ll try and end this piece with a forwards looking view to predictions for next year.

Anana delivers solutions across two main lines of business. Our first of course is our Enterprise Contact Centre solutions unit.  How has this unit performed this year?  Not ignoring our ‘business as usual’ integration work, here are a few of our key milestones in the year;

1. We delivered a global virtualised contact centre solution for a household Brand. The heart of it was a SIP based solution, featuring the Genesys Voice Platform. Powered by Nuance Speech recognition, the Anana Speech Applications Framework (for VoiceXML and driving the Speech Recognition) its key highlight was service offerings in 17 countries supporting 12 languages concurrently.  Truly trans-continental call manipulation and custom telephony desktop and computer telephony integration
2. Our Anana Briefing Centre (ABC), a £1.4 Million (Sterling) investment went from concept to reality. The ABC is a state of the art demonstration and workshop facility that has allowed Anana, our partners and in some cases our ‘competitors’ to “Show” rather than “Tell” the 21st Century Customer Interaction Management capability of Genesys.  I think the most remarkable testament to the validity of the ABC is that our shortest lifecycle from first-view of the “Art of the Possible” to contract award for a large Bank in the Middle-East, who even flew all the way to the Centre for a Saturday workshop was 6 weeks!  By far though, the most telling thing that it has done, is to give our existing, as well as knew clients the confidence they need to proceed; and the ability to do so in record time-frames. Contact Centre projects are typically 18 months long; even in the pre-sales and sales lifecycle. 2011 saw our customers engaging, buying and deploying in weeks!  A high confidence in execution and delivery is a good place to begin new ways to engage!
3. We delivered the first Genesys Social Engagement projects in Europe, both with Tier 1 service providers that saw the first phases of true cross channel and multi-channel customer service go from concept to reality, including web-chat, email, Facebook and Twitter as customer service capabilities beyond inbound and outbound voice. We then went on to win a 3rd engagement in as many weeks with a Bank for the same blended eServices and Multichannel Customer Service capability.  Most remarkably we were asked to deliver one of these solutions, on premise for a Pilot in only 10 days.  We did it!  One of them is delivered in a hybrid Cloud; with Anana running all the technology, yet providing Desktop based access to Genesys Interaction Workspace over Xenapp.  Very cool stuff.
4. We delivered new mobile applications that bring customer services directly to the consumer smart-phone; including some cool concepts like reversing the role of the Contact Centre wallboard; showing customers how many agents were available for each media type so the customer could chose the means of engaging that made most sense and avoided delay.  This delivered customer service efficiency for both the customer and the customer services team.  A true win:win situation. The mobile app featured customer initiated ‘please call me back’, live text-chat and the ability for the customer themself to review their entire cross channel interaction history with their provider in real time.
5. We extended Genesys Social Engagement with several new features including Social Influence scoring and originate Tweet from the agent desktop without requiring a customer interaction and manipulated the Genesys solution to support Arabic language for Social Media interactions. Coolest use case derived was using Social Influence scores determined in eServices transactions to route Voice calls based not only on the assigned customer segment in Voice but their underlying Social Influence.  Let this be a sign of things to come!
6. We delivered new innovation in a hybrid self and assisted service customer service application for SMS.  A customer would interact with an automated Knowledge Management (FAQ) system by asking a question in SMS. If the customer then responds to the suggested response with another question, we take the ‘history’ of the self service interaction and offer the customer the opportunity to chat with an agent.  The customer continue’s to engage via SMS, but Anana technology takes those SMS interactions and delivers them to “web-chat” agents in the contact centre.  This is a twisted cross-channel conversation of course! The CSR is on a web-chat interface, and the customer is on an SMS interface; yet both can chat happily back and forth! This is an exciting blended technology capability; allowing the Enterprise to train once for Web-Chat in customer service, but extend other media through the same interface.  Not a big deal when you have to train 5 agents of course! But, what about the overhead if your busy hour team is 9000 agents strong?
7. We concluded our first Social Media and Customer Services contracted Business Consulting project that is already delivering the execution foundation for a significant project for one of our partners in early 2012.  This is new ground within the Genesys partner, Value Added Reseller (VAR) and Systems Integration Market.
8. We won some very large contracts in ongoing Mission Critical Customer Service platform and solutions support that give our customers assurance of Customer Service solutions availability 24x7x365 – the key thing is these mission critical support contracts are about yesterdays legacy technology support whilst in evolution to IP and SIP and Anana support operation has a hand on both at the same time.  Our customers are crossing the PSTN/TDM to SIP valley.  Anana is the bridge that is helping them to cross safely and with surety
9. We completed a very nice high-net-worth banking integration for one of the UK’s most prestigious Banks that integrated 1990′s mainframe with 2010 customer service platforms. Boy, I’d so love to say who it was for and why!
10. The Anana team stood side-by-side with Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent showcasing, demonstrating and tackling industry analysts and events all most if not all Contact Centre events in all themes eServices and Social Media related.  This included a humbling invite to showcase Genesys’ own technology to its European sales teams in Cannes in late summer.  That for me is the strongest vote of confidence in thought and market leadership with some of these leading themes.

In the service provider and Carrier Telecommunications business we had a great year too!

• Anana was selected out of the entire ecosystem of global “Applications Enablement” partners to assist Alcatel-Lucent at the IMS World Forum in Barcelona. It is an absolute honour for Anana to be aiding and abetting €17Billion company in showcasing their own capabilities to Global Audiences
• We completed the integration for its4u – the Anana Social Media and Voice Mail solution that links the dial-tone at the voice messaging event with the subscribers voice prompts.  Replacing the old and rather stagnant Voice Mail experience with one where the caller hears the latest Social Media updates of the mailbox owner before leaving a message.  This is a hybrid solution using Anana speech applications framework and the Genesys Voice Platform, Nuance Speech Recogntion, Ivona Text-to-Speech and the Converged Messaging System (CMS) and Messaging Applications Broker from Alcatel-Lucent.
• Anana has been formally selected by Alcatel-Lucent as an applications partner for innovation with the Converged Telephony System, the CTS (5420) and the IP Multimedia Subsystem with Alcatel-Lucents Agility API sets.  We are working closely together to showcase extreme innovation in manipulation and subscriber controlled telephony with integrated Voice User Interface, Graphical User Interface (web 2.0) that will be shown to the world for the first time at Mobile World Congress early next year.  This is really exciting stuff, but can’t talk about it too much yet!  Again we are offering a hybrid technical solution that uses the best in breed core Carrier equipment in the IMS core from Alcatel-Lucent, with the Genesys Voice Platform (for media in VoiceXML and call control in CC-XML).  Imagine a web2.0 dashboard with all your friends in it; like your own social dashboard. Click and drag your friends onto the ‘conference table’ and you’ll all be instantly on your own conference party line.  Sound Cool?  That’s just a small snippet out of the technology we are building in this space.

Looking ahead to 2012

Should I be bold and predict what I think are going to be the key things going on in the Contact Centre markets in 2012?  Perhaps; let’s see how accurate these turn out to be;

• Permira acquisition of Genesys Telecommunications labs will manifest itself through intense market engagement and focus on the key current drivers in Customer Service. These will be;
• Intense investment in Mobile Applications for Customer Service and Customer Interaction Management as such a high proportion of the consumer markets are now armed with smart devices
• eServices power-play for email, SMS, web-chat, web-callback and Social Media to rapidly evolve. Why? I think the Enterprise will learn very quickly in 2012 that they have to listen and engage WHERE their customers are trying or preferring to reach them, and secondly, they have to LISTEN and ENGAGE where customers are talking ABOUT them – both of these will work in harmony to force the enterprise to offer a holistic and channel intenstive customer service capability
• We will see a general increased focus on the role for customer services and customer care as it relates to Social Media as a paradigm. The enterprise will recognise for its full effect the “New Voice of the Customer”. 2011 saw the early adopters begin to define best practice and physical and technical capability to execute. 2012 will be the year where the rest of the market realises how far behind they are falling and how fast they will have to move to catch up. Not as a special business practice; but as a wholly and deeply integrated customer service capability in the core of the incumbent customer operation
• Twitter will relax their 1000 tweets a day and 250 direct messages a day limits for certain enterprise entities – making it possible for BRANDS to offer customer service on Twitter. 2011 saw the Enterprise facing a tough problem. 100,000 customers are tweeting at us with customer service queries but I can only respond to a maximum of 300 an hour, and even then only 1000 in any 24 hours.  This is a huge problem in late 2011 for those engaging in “Social Customer Service” and I hope and trust that Twitter will offer BRANDS the ability to execute in 2012
• Facebook will be less about BRAND broadcast and become more a platform to ‘engage’ with the customers who “LIKE” the brand
• Google+ likely to become the second Social Platform
• Our customers will be asking us to integrate YouTube and YouTube comments into customer care
• Anana is going to spend a lot of time and energy helping the Enterprise align and bring together the three key drivers of “customer engagement’
• Marketing & the Brand
• Online and Digital Strategy
• Customer Operations, Customer Service and Customer Care

On that note, Merry Christmas to to all our Customers, Partners and friends, and best wishes for 2012! If 2012 is only half as wild as 2011 it will still be a great year! Let’s see how the predications shape out through the year!

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

Today, we are looking at eServices Social Media and Social Engagement Interactions. This operational Customer Services Solution is deployed in the Anana Briefing Centre and is powered completely by Genesys Telecommunications Labs Customer Interaction Management Platform. This post features a detailed video walk through of Genesys 8.1 solution as integrated and demonstrated by Anana for the Facebook channel.

Some key notes about this demonstration

• The recording was filmed in real-time. Therefore latencies and interaction speeds have not been adapted, edited or ammended
• The Genesys Agent Desktop was connected remotely do the Genesys installation via a slow VPN connection; and is not representative of a typical Enterprise deployment
• All features and functions explored are standard and native Genesys 8.1, Out of the Box, without adaptation or change
• The is no narrative to the recording. Guidance is provided in text overlays. Please watch for them carefully
• Please start the video, and then select the fullscreen option for the best experience. Their is a lot of information in the interface, and you won’t see it if it remains thumbnailed. Also 720 HD version has been preselected for you for obvious reasons!
• If you like this video, and would like us to prepare more, then please let us know using the comments option at the bottom of this post
• The ABC Anana (Anana Briefing Centre) is configured to capture Facebook Interactions via the eServices Social Media Server using the default Genesys Routing and Engagement Strategy. It does require that consumers specifically target the Company Facebook Page account which you can find here. This is important because the demonstration clearly indicates that we have configured our solution to LISTEN to what is being said ABOUT US as well as what is said directly TO us.
• For those not yet familiar with the ABC_ANANA (ABC Company); it is a fictitious enterprise that we use in the Anana Briefing Centre as the modelled Contact Centre instance for demonstration and workshop purposes only. It is not a real company, whereas Anana Ltd is! Please do not approach the ABC Company seeking employment or to buy products or services! (You’ll be amazed!)
• The video assumes that the Enterprise has embraced a full Voice and eServices blended cross-channel communications strategy. Perhaps when you watch the video you will see why this makes sense

Now, please sit back, and enjoy the video of Genesys and Anana in action in Social Engagement with Customers via Facebook.

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!