My Take on the Importance of Social Media in Contact Centers and Unified Communications
My colleagues at UCStrategies and I have often talked about how unified communications came from the contact center as both “markets” share common functionality, such as presence capability, reporting, chat, etc. We also have talked about the drivers behind getting companies to adopt unified communications with discussions about ROI, business benefits, end-user benefits, and infrastructure upgrades, for example. Social media/networking has now provided us with more fodder for these discussions because of the potential to be applied in contact centers and UC, because:
- Adoption of social media by the general population is soaring
- Usage of social media is spilling over into the workplace, just as it did with instant messaging
- Most users are passively, if unknowingly pushing social media as a customer service channel for businesses
- Savvy users are beginning to understand how to influence companies by what they say (post, tweet, etc.) on social media sites
This last point is an interesting one. Should companies embrace social networking as a business tool? When social media first emerged, in the form of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and then Twitter, the primary driver was for people to just connect and share. Until LinkedIn came along, it seemed that very few people thought about using any of these social outlets as a business tool. Plus, businesses had bigger fish to fry. In parallel with the emergence of social networking, was the development of unified communications, the switch over to IP, the emergence of cloud computing, just to name a few. Ups and downs in the economy, tightening budgets, and an aging installed base of data and telecom technology, also were worries jockeying for position in the minds and budgets of enterprises and the vendor companies that supply them in these areas.
However, the answer is yes. Businesses thrive on information. Concurrent with the move to adopting unified communications, the communications industry greatly advanced the capabilities of the contact center, and further developed and integrated adjunct business solutions such as workforce management, and customer relationship management applications with UC and the contact center. Also concurrent with this was the drive to look at business reporting and analytics across the entire business.
This is where social networking comes in and why its value is being pondered, and exploited. What a vast wealth of information out there just waiting to be mined. Think about it. This week Facebook boasted its 500 millionth user. That is 500 million people who are opening up their emotional underwear drawers telling their friends, families, and sometimes the world (if they don’t read the privacy fine print) about their likes, dislikes, worries, concerns, passions and joys. This is like brain candy for the information junkie. Add to this real-time streams of data, such as Twitter, wikis, blogs, forums, media sharing, podcasts, etc. and it is mind-boggling the trends and topics to be tracked.
We might not know what the face of social media is going to look like in one, five or ten years, but it is not going away, folks. So you might as well use it. Although social media is slanted to younger generations becoming consumers, it is not demographically-challenged in that all age groups are embracing varying flavors of social networking. For example, Siemens commissioned research on social media use and whether companies are ready to use it, and one data point showed that 41% of users that are online in the 50+ age group visit social networking sites.
Some companies get the value of social media. This month we have seen lots of announcements from our contact center and UC vendors on new products or product plans for integrating social media into their product mixes. Speaking of Siemens, as a follow up to the company’s November announcement of Twitter integration into the contact center, Siemens announced new OpenScape Fusion Social Media integrations to be delivered through OpenScale Professional Services. The integration examples they gave in the company’s press release encapsulated much of what we have been hearing from the vendors that are getting it. Although certainly not all inclusive by any stretch they were:
- “Automated routing of inbound and outbound social media interactions to improve customer interactions with contact center agents
- Seamless integration of social media interactions and data into existing contact center management, monitoring and reporting tools, streamlining processes and improving efficiency
- Availability of subject matter experts or customer assistance personnel via social networking sites, simplifying and speeding customer response
- Streamlined information sharing via blogs, corporate wikis and chat groups through UCC desktop integration, improving team collaboration
- Automated updates to presence status and conferencing abilities through social networking sites such as Twitter, making it easier to connect with colleagues and customers “
Other vendors announcing this month included Interactive Intelligence, who announced a partnership with Buzzient to incorporate social media into the contact center to monitor social media “chatter”, by using customer-defined keywords, and then routing the pertinent content as email messages to the person or agent best suited to handle the content, based on business rules and agent skill set. Interactive is taking advantage of a growing number of companies that “listen” to the social media chatter that is being generated, which in itself is a clue to how important social media is becoming.
Speaking of chatter, don’t let Avaya’s social media interests get lost in the chatter of the company’s UC and contact center announcements this week, which were many. Avaya is deep into developing social media solutions for their product portfolio. Avaya has taken social media feeds, and has gone beyond looking at just the buzzword traffic, by listening and then filtering, and then looking at the context of the messages, and then passing those onto the appropriate contact center agent. Avaya’s Social Media Manager automates the process of filtering through thousands of interactions for those that are both relevant and actionable before passing them on. For example, someone might be tweeting about a flight delay, but if it is due to weather, and not something that the airlines did, then it is probably not relevant or worth the airlines taking action on. Filters can be topics or even language detection so that the item gets routed to the agent with the right language skill set too. Avaya is working with customers and actively talking about their Social Media Manager, so look to see more announcements on this near term.
Finally, it’s not just that vendors are responding to the existence of social media, it is that some, such as Avaya and Cisco have stated that they don’t have a crystal ball as to how the whole social media phenomenon will play out, but that it is important enough to build all the hooks and handles they can into their products so that whatever new applications come along companies will be able to use. It is like saying that they are making their products social media ready. Along the way they will have products such as Cisco Pulse, or Avaya Social Media Manager, to deploy in any way a customer sees fit, taking advantage of what social media is currently being embraced, but will leave the products open so that as new social media is developed, customers can take advantage of it too.
I like that. I have talked to a many vendors about whether or not they have developed, started to develop, or even have plans for incorporation social media into their product portfolios, and whereas I have seen one group of vendors, such as those mentioned above, embracing the whole issue, another group farther behind is developing one or two pieces and evaluating others. The ones that are not paying attention at all, or don’t believe that social media is important, are missing the boat.