Social media is booming but its use by businesses is largely ad hoc, unstructured, and unable to scale.
This is according to unified communications company Cisco, which says businesses should embrace social media by using it to leverage customer service and care. “Customer collaboration will have increasingly larger impacts on corporate profitability and brand value,” it says.
The company says businesses worldwide use contact centre technology to routinely handle millions of customer contacts a day, including voice calls, video, e-mail, chat, and Web interactions.
“However, with changing times, where social media is taking the forefront, businesses should respond by being proactive with social media customer care.”
In line with this, the company has released software that enables organisations to find and proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Twitter and Facebook or other public forums as well as blogging sites.
The company explains that with this software called Cisco SocialMiner; status updates, forum posts or blogs from customers can all be monitored in real time - alerting enterprises of conversations related to their brand.
According to Internet media and market research firm Nielsen, over one million Tweets are sent out every hour, while 34% of online Americans have used Facebook, Twitter or other social media to rant or rave about a product, company or brand.
“With more and more Web-based conversations taking place over these social Web platforms, it's now more critical than ever that businesses are aware of what their customers are saying about them and are able to respond to general inquiries or rectify customer service issues so as to enhance and protect brand reputation,” Cisco says.
According to John Hernandez, vice-president and general manager, customer collaboration business unit at Cisco, companies are realising that by ignoring the online chatter; “they're opening up opportunities for their competitors and allowing dialogue about their brand to happen without them.”
Hernandez says the company also unveiled Cisco Finesse, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care representatives that puts all the information they need in a single, customisable cockpit.
“This collaboration desktop integrates all the information businesses need into a single, customisable interface that enables them to help callers faster,” he explains.
Cisco adds that it also introduced of a new network-based rich media capture platform that supports recording, playback, live streaming and storage of media, including audio and video, with rich recording metadata.
According to Cisco, adopting social media contact centres can help lower operational costs for businesses and increase the number of satisfied customers.
Share