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Here's Why You Should Integrate Social Media Within Your Contact Center
by Erina Suzuki | Published On April 8, 2022
Social media is more than replaying cute cat videos, learning recipes from 20-second clips, and discovering trending memes on Twitter. For many organizations, social media is a highly effective tool that can be leveraged as a competitive advantage for their customer service.
According to Social Media Today, nearly 70% of consumers have said that they have used social media for issues to do with customer service on at least one occasion. By integrating social media into your contact center, your organization can enhance its customer service and stay ahead of the competition. Continue reading to find out why you should integrate social media into your contact center.
- Improve response rates and customer satisfaction: In 2021, it was reported that 45% of brands took more than five days to respond to messages through their Facebook Pages (Hootsuite). Rather than waiting on an employee to manually check each social media platform, automate the monitoring, routing, and queuing of a social media interaction to the most appropriate agent. Improve response rates and enhance customer satisfaction by responding to interactions quickly.
- Boost agent productivity: Reduce agents’ time spent switching between platforms by allowing them to handle all social media interactions within their contact center application. Since social media messages are automatically routed to agents, they can spend their extra time focusing on other important tasks.
- Reduce the need for agent training: Incoming social media interactions can be handled within your contact center platform. By presenting interactions in a familiar interface, agents do not need additional training and support to master new tools. As a result, agents can use tools they are comfortable with.
- Communicate with customers on their preferred social media platform: Consumer Reports shared that 84% of consumers who posted complaints on social media used Facebook. Engage with your audience on platforms where they spend most of their time – whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms. Using platforms your customers regularly engage with enables organizations to communicate and address questions or concerns as soon as they arise.
- Unify customer experiences: Having multiple ways for customers to connect with you is great, but what's even better is unifying these interactions and eliminating communication silos. By linking customer profiles across channels, customers can switch from one messaging channel to another and retain previous conversation history with agents to avoid repeating themselves.
- Provide quick answers to your customers: Quick responses are key when it comes to customer service – it shows the customer you care about their issues. Thankfully, contact centers can automate quick replies to social media channels. Answer common queries on Facebook Messenger or Twitter with canned responses to provide quick assistance on frequently asked questions, saving time and streamlining communication.
Ensure a seamless experience for all customers by integrating your social media channels with your contact center. In this day and age where timely, personalized support is the norm, adding social media into your contact center allows you to better serve your customers and in turn, enhance your organization’s overall customer service. For customer service tips, check out the Four Pillars of Customer Service: Getting Connected, Process Orchestration, Knowledge and Insights, and Resource Management.