Call centers can be a source of both rewarding customer saves and nail-biting frustration.
When an irate customer calls to complain about something and your rep not only soothes their hurt feelings but turns it into a sale, you want to jump and shout, “Hallelujah!”
The flip side of the coin is the customer who is wrong, misused the product, blames you for their mistake, and can’t be mollified no matter what you do or say short of your CEO committing hari-kari in public. Needless to say, those are the customers who squawk and badmouth your company all over the internet.
You need some help in boosting the positive visibility of your call center. Social media can help, in more ways than one.
Let Me Count The Ways
Social media can help by showcasing your responsiveness to customer concerns. By hiring employees dedicated to managing your social media strategy you can save your company’s image, turn it around, and improve it. Put the same time, energy, and resources into it that you would into any other advertising campaign and you’ll start seeing good results.
Best Buy had the reputation of being unresponsive and overpriced. It took the plunge into social media and began aggressively pursuing social media solutions to communicate with customers and monitor their satisfaction on Facebook, LinkedIn, wikis, and others. The result has a been a slow but steady turnaround in their public image.
Avaya, a telecommunications company, made the decision to embrace social media strategies. One of their employees followed up on a customer inquiry on Twitter that eventually turned into a quarter million dollar sale! That strategy paid for itself rather handsomely, wouldn’t you say?
Everyone won’t have six-figure sales increases of course, but the bottom line is, More Call Centers are Using Social Media for Customer Service – And It’s Working.
AI in the Call Center
Does this mean AI (Artificial Intelligence) will take over your call center? Not even close. What it means is that social media and AI will enhance the effectiveness of your call center by automating the repetitive tasks that need handling every day, but don’t require human intuition or empathy. In fact, when you first launch your social media accounts, you’ll need more human interaction than normal to get them going.
The Algorithm Cycle
When a user searches for something on social media, the platform ranks the results by a combination of how many views, likes, and comments each account receives. Those with the most are ranked highest, which means they’ll be the first ones the user sees. Naturally, those sights will then get more views, likes, and comments as a result of having more views, likes, and comments. It becomes a self-reinforcing cyclone constantly building higher and higher.
The converse is also true. Accounts with fewer views, likes, and comments will be listed lower in the search results, guaranteeing that fewer people will view their accounts and fewer people will like or comment on their accounts. They’ll get fewer views, likes, and comments based on the fact they don’t have many views, likes, and comments, to begin with. It creates a vicious downward spiral.
Buying Followers
You can have the best integrated cloud-based call center with the most advanced systems in the world, but if no one knows you’re there, what difference does it make? But given the realities of the social media cyclone, how do you jump-start your account’s visibility? Answer: you use some of your advertising budget to buy some followers.
Companies like socialmediadaily.com offer more than just bots and zombie accounts when you buy followers and views. They have actual people getting paid (usually in bitcoin) to visit your account, view what’s on there, like it, and even leave some comments on there to generate a sense of life and interaction.
If you pay for them to leave comments you can control what kind of comments are left. This is where you instruct them to ask questions, questions you can then go back and answer online. The speed with which you answer these questions will demonstrate to other users that you take customer comments seriously and you’re paying attention to their concerns.
It shows you’re ready and willing to engage with customers, to listen to them and treat them as a person instead of a cash machine. That kind of interaction with worth its weight in gold. It will pay dividends far into the future with loyal customers coming back time and time again.