What is Social Media, Anyway?
Social media is a term that defines a number of applications that enable people to connect directly with each other and among a self-selected group. These web-based applications often extend beyond the desktop to mobile devices, including smart phones. Common examples include Twitter, which enables people to post a stream of short (140-character) messages to be viewed by those who choose to “follow” them; Facebook, which enables people to post messages, photos, and interactive applications on a web page to be viewed by those the owner accepts as “friends”; and LinkedIn, a business-oriented application that enables people to share resume and skills information to their chosen “contacts” as well as – with permission –their contacts’ list of contacts.

While these public applications were developed primarily to enhance connectivity among friends, family, and acquaintances – hence the term “social” media – each has been adopted for business-related purposes. And each has a place in today’s contact center. In fact, many of today’s CRM applications embed functionality to enable agents and managers to integrate directly with these public applications.

Some of the newer contact center applications go beyond integrating popular public social networking applications and include private sCRM applications that link agents, managers, and other company representatives. While public applications have proven value in the contact center, the development of private applications is where social networking will truly deliver results for the contact center.

sCRM in the Contact Center
Your college roommate uses social media to share a humorous incident or lyrics of a favorite song to a group of connected friends; what type of information does a contact center need to share? Social media has a number of applications:

• To rapidly share information from experts on fixes, workarounds, and other important information.
• To share information beyond the contact center, with sales and others who have interest in any particular account or product.
• To monitor a particular account, problem, or product by “subscribing” to relevant calls, incidents, or knowledge items.
• To monitor pending situations and manage company reputation.

Product bugs/defects are a good example – if a customer is experiencing a problem, everyone on the team should know. QA needs the heads-up to work on a fix, other support agents should share fix or workaround information to clients calling in with similar problems, and sales reps need to know that now might not be the best time to close that big deal that’s on the table. Currently, the way that type of knowledge is distributed is via a knowledge base, which requires someone to seek it out. Social media enables contact centers to push relevant information right to the appropriate people – and enables people to “subscribe” to information they think is important. Building this type of capability in the “private cloud” enables companies to share relevant information quickly to all who need it.

Public tools such as Twitter bring information from the outside world into the contact center. For example, if your company’s product is used in conjunction with a Microsoft Office application, your agents can “subscribe” to any Twitter posts that mention it. If a problem is brewing, your company will have a chance to prepare for any associated problems. Public tools also are an important way to monitor your own company – if someone “tweets” positive news, you should “re-tweet” it and pass it along. If someone tweets negative news, you should reach out immediately and directly. Small problems have a way of getting large very fast on public forums; use public sCRM tools to stay on top of your reputation. 

Integrating public and private sCRM tools enables the best of both worlds for CRM contact centers.

Measuring the Value
Social media can deliver tangible value to CRM contact centers, as well as ancillary benefits. While no tool is a panacea for every customer support issue, sCRM can deliver the following benefits:

Enable rapid-fire exchange of pertinent data, “pushed” directly to appropriate and self-selected people.

• Build enthusiasm with younger workers by adopting popular toolsets such as Twitter, Facebook, and internally developed tools that mimic those interfaces. This is particularly important in industries such as manufacturing that struggle to attract younger workers.
• Dramatically improve the time in which information can be shared.
• Break down barriers created by agents who tend to “hold onto” knowledge, or share only with a close circle of accomplices. Social networking rewards those who share knowledge openly, quickly, and concisely – those who have the best fixes will have the most followers, which is the currency of today’s sCRM.
• Improve dynamism and collaboration – with everyone virtually linked, it is much easier to build teams, generate enthusiasm, and build excitement.

Despite the excitement around sCRM, it is important to note that it is not a panacea for all customer support problems. It eases and speeds the transfer of knowledge, but it will not create solutions out of thin air. It can generate enthusiasm among your workforce, but it will not solve every HR problem. Realistically, sCRM can provide a number of business benefits, and with the new crop of toolsets available, it is a worthy investment for the contact center.