SA's biggest cellphone operator will harness the power of social media to up its customer service via deployment of a social engagement solution.
Vodacom has invested in its customer care by deploying software provided by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories. The company says it is one of the first to deploy Genesys Social Engagement, a platform that automates and integrates social media interactions with customers throughout its contact centre and customer service operations.
“For the first time, Vodacom customer service agents will be able to seamlessly switch from social media interactions to another mode of contact, without losing context or data.”
The Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) platform allows Vodacom to moderate the more than 16 million calls to its customer call centre per month. Blended e-services agents within the contact centres handle non-voice interactions such as chat, SMS, Web callback and e-mail.
Social standing
Vodacom has by far the largest social media following compared to its main counterparts MTN, Cell C, 8ta and Virgin Mobile. On the two primary social platforms, Twitter and Facebook, the amount of followers and “likes” the operator has in tow is currently three- to 15-fold more than SA's second cellphone operator, MTN.
A Vodacom spokesperson notes the discrepancy in active social media followers is one of the things that often gives the impression that the operator's customer service is not up to scratch. “Because we have so many people commenting and posting, positive and negative feedback, it appears that we have the most gripes. But this is just because the volumes of commentary are so much higher.”
Vodacom says, in light of its growing number of postings via social media that require a response from the Vodacom customer support team, it is determined to more effectively handle the virtual platform. To date, Vodacom had been using a manual approach to handling social media queries.
Genesys Social Engagement, which supports Twitter and Facebook, facilitates Vodacom agents by allowing them to use existing routing, reporting and agent desktop technologies to handle social media as part of a cross-channel customer service strategy, built around driving customer conversations.
Integrated interaction
Eben Dreyer, solution development manager at Vodacom, says the company's goal is to be responsive, and social media is just another channel for customers to get in touch with it. “A posting on a Web site may be only part of an interaction a customer may be having with us, so it is important that we have a highly integrated approach that allows us to uniformly handle all interactions.”
Genesys CEO Paul Segre says social media has changed interaction in a fundamental way, to the extent that it is “now transforming customer service”. He says this is where the value of delivering cross-channel customer conversation lies, an advantage that Vodacom has “recognised”.
Vodacom worked with its partner, Dimension Data, in defining project requirements and implementing the Genesys Social Engagement
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