Social Networking in the Contact CenterSocial Networking in the Contact Center
Moving beyond how or why companies should do it, beyond trials and proof of concepts to actual deployments.
March 27, 2012
Moving beyond how or why companies should do it, beyond trials and proof of concepts to actual deployments.
There was a great session this afternoon on social media in the contact center. How do I define great? Last year we had ~30 attendees. This year we had 5 times that. (In totally unrelated news, last year the session was at 8 am, this year at a very civilized 3:15 pm.) As the session moderator (that would be me) mentioned at the start, social media in the contact center has moved beyond how or why companies should do it, beyond trials and proof of concepts to actual deployments.
The three speakers did a great job--short on company slides, long on use cases. Each of the speakers--Lisa Abbott from Genesys, Tod Famous from Cisco and Laura Bassett from Avaya--presented three use cases. Most of the references were cloaked, i.e., the industry but not the name of the firm was disclosed. The exception here was two of Genesys' reference customers: Vodacom and Everything Everything, both European carriers.
We also had some great audience questions. One had to do with whether social media customer care was an issue in the business to business market (B2B) or only business to consumer. The consensus of the speakers was while there is social media usage in B2B, the volume of interactions probably does not warrant the sophistication of contact center queuing and routing.
Another question had to do with the integration of customer information, e.g., knowing when a customer calls that they have also had a Twitter exchange, or have posted on the company Facebook fan page. While the panelists agreed that it was important, there was not a lot of detail provided on how each company's solutions would actually address this issue.
If you are here at Enterprise Connect, there are two more contact center sessions. Tuesday morning at 8 am I'll moderate a session on Contact Center and the Cloud with speakers from Broadsoft, Echopass, inContact and Interactive Intelligence. On Wednesday, executives from each of the contact center market leaders (Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, and Interactive Intelligence) will join me for a session entirely driven by questions from the audience.
