Important Reasons To Integrate Social Media With Contact Center

Consumers are now engaging with businesses via social media more than ever to answer a customer service complaint or share their experience. If the company in question has not integrated their contact center with social media to engage with its clients, it is missing a huge opportunity to get on the boat. 

For example, people like you and I check our phones and scroll through social media frequently. That's where the demography is. It will be absurd for a brand not to exist on social media and roll itself backward. 

Social networking can help brands achieve a significant competitive edge and boost the company's credibility as a whole. On the contrary, the company is poised to incur massive losses in revenue, reputation, and otherwise if they are unwilling to adapt. Today's marketplace is highly competitive and very fast-faced. Under such circumstances, a company's chances of surviving and, in fact, thriving depends on a host of factors. 

Why Social Media Integration is Imperative to all Contact Centers?

For a business to sustain itself in this market, a discussion on social media needs to occur. Here's are a few points of why social media integration is imperative to all contact centers.

Missing customer mentions is equivalent to missing inbound calls at the call center. All available social networking sites should be audited before introducing a social media strategy or customer service plan. Agents should be trained on how to gauge these mentions and respond to huge volumes of requests made online.

Within a reasonable time, a dedicated team of agents will track and respond to customers. The forum for social media then becomes as powerful as the conventional contact center software. Instant responses to the customers via social media can be a huge winning factor for the brand. Customers will feel significant and heard, unlike how they have to wait on traditional channels like an IVR or an email. 

Smartphones and tablets are the targeted gadgets used for daily interactions. 50% of all replies to social media questions from users are conducted on mobile devices, according to The Centre of Media Studies. This goes to show the sheer pervasiveness of mobile, handheld technology in our society at this point. To not invest time and resources to ensure mobile adaptation of the company's online platforms just showcases the lack of desire the business in question has of competing.

Social networking may be used by contact centers to reach out to their clients better. Constructive experiences draw prospective clients. Firms may monitor input from the use of hashtags and then respond to and address consumer problems. According to a survey, up to 47% of social media consumers who use the platforms for their service requests also use them to exchange customer service experiences with others. 

A key piece to the puzzle of navigating the world of social media is to remember what the brand stands for, what values it aims to uphold, and finally creating a model for customer service on that foundation. Thus, it becomes essential for a brand to ensure contact center social media integration for customers' smooth experience.

Social networking offers clients a forum and an ability to connect with firms as members of a wider audience. This also helps all customers access the latest information available publicly without bias. Your existing customers will interact with your prospects, and it can go either way based on how well you maintain your digital presence. Digital forums have led to brand-based debates and discussions, enabling the end-user to gather information from experienced customers. Over time, such platforms serve to open up even broader discussions – effectively giving the company's contact center with much-needed information to improve their goods and services to remain competitive.

Retaining clients is universally observed and accepted to be more cost-effective than obtaining new ones. A company can ensure customer loyalty through digital giveaways, sharing relevant knowledge, creating a dependable brand presence. It thus becomes essential to stay connected to customers as much and as closely as possible, and thus the importance of blending the contact center software & social media becomes evident by itself. 

Handling customer service requests via social media channels is up to 12 times cheaper than handling the same requests by phone, says Brandwatch.It has now been revealed by studies conducted in this field that social media integration with the contact center of a business improves first-call responses by far more than a mere one percent. This ends up helping the company save substantial operating costs.

Shorter response times and personal social media engagement with clients result in increased customer loyalty. To demonstrate with a case, Domino's contact center leveraged social media in 2009 to resolve its personnel and merchandise complaints. Then, it reacted with far-reaching and dramatic improvements. Sales went up by 14% in the following year. To be fair, the strategy is universal and can be used for its benefit.

Source: Business2community

To provide context, Twitter and Facebook combined clock an estimated 1.5 billion users. Add to that, LinkedIn, and more people than ever before, are utilizing social media for many purposes and are doing so more frequently. In a survey conducted by Nielsen, 74% of respondents indicated that they wanted to do business with a company based on interactions and experiences they read on social media. This highlights the gravitas social media carries in the context of marketing today.

Contact Center operators don't have to be thoroughly qualified on any specific product or tech to manage social media accounts. That is because it is now common to most individuals. Within minimum advice and protocol training, agents can be easily onboarded on social media. This not only makes contact center social media integration a financially viable option for companies; it is also hardly labor-intensive.

 

Conclusion

While there are more reasons to integrate social media to the customer service and contact center team, it is important that it is not a one off solution but seamlessly integrates with all other touchpoints. C-Zentrix  Contact Center Software seamlessly integrates the social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram and others with all other touchpoints like voice and non-voice channels. Another aspect to take into account is to easily move a social media post/mention to direct message (DM) so that the brand can directly resolve the issue in the shortest possible time.