Much has been written lately about using social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, for customer service - especially because social channels, unlike traditional customer care ones, offer an almost instant two-way communication.
However, in the majority of South African organisations, social channels are not owned by contact centres, but by marketing departments who utilise them for campaigns and use sophisticated tools to measure the response on these.
For both marketing and the contact centre, the social platform is the ideal stage to enhance customer engagement, but who then in the business should own social channels? And, how can marketing and the contact centre work together?
Shilpa Puri, senior channel manager at Aspect, an Ocular partner company, says: "Some organisations have responded by taking the customer service component of social out of marketing and placed it within their customer contact centres. Marketing still retains outbound social responsibility, and the campaigns and lead generation going along with that. Customer service then takes charge of inbound social, including lead generation and customer service queries and complaints."
She notes that this shift of responsibility has led to new confusions. "How are customer service responsibilities divided with the contact centre? Not all agents have the skills to deal with the rapid fire - and very public - exchanges that come with social media. So while modern contact centre software and platforms are adept at combining social with the traditional contact centre strengths of phone and e-mail, not every agent is going to be good at social," she elaborates.
One response is to set up a dedicated social team within the contact centre, says Puri. "A social agent can deal with social queries, but must also work closely with other, non-social, agents to ensure a consistent customer experience.
"That's because, although social is the avenue for many initial customer service queries, dealing with them appropriately generally means having to take the interaction private, or into another two-way channel, such as voice," she says.
Puri concludes that the answer to who owns social is two-fold. "Marketing can retain its outbound responsibilities, while customer service takes care of inbound. The trick, for any customer service organisation, is ensuring that the customer has a consistent experience, and their query or complaint is dealt with in a fast and effective manner."
And, this is the crux of it - the customer.
If social media within a company is seen as belonging to the customer who just wants to be assisted, teams can be put in place to effectively engage and do what's best for the customer.
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