Banking Review

Are you being served?

New social media channels in business are inevitable,  say Gartner’s experts, so best to prepare now

BY CHARIS PALMER

Customer service strategists should worry less about which service channels to invest in and more about getting their organisation ready to cope with more channels, say experts.

“Our research shows that you will reduce your call volumes by 12 per cent if you introduce one new channel,” says Johan Jacobs, research director of web customer service with Gartner. “Don’t ever be concerned about channel adoption, it will happen.”

Jacobs says he gets many calls from executives wondering whether to invest in new service channels.
“What you should worry about is internal readiness,” says Jacobs. “Are you ready for web chat? Are your people trained, is your company ready for posting (on forums), do you have some Google-like spies out there that can collect what’s being said about you on social media?”

Paul Cahill, who heads up customer service at telecommunication group iinet, says even if just one customer was expecting to be served via a new channel, he would find a way to support them.
“If a customer wants to talk to us and there’s a channel that we haven’t done, we’ll find a way to get across it. If that means grouping it with another channel, that’s what we do.”

Cahill says customers are ultimately telling businesses where they want to be served. “We didn’t say, “let’s invent Twitter and see if our customers want us”, we had customers on there making comments about the brand, about the business and about their problems. They dragged us on to there.”

Investing in new channels is already paying off for iinet. Cahill says when the company added web chat and click-to-call to its sales sign up page, it boosted sales by six per cent. A recent launch of new phone plans netted more than 100 Twitter posts and more than 500 posts on telecommunications forum Whirlpool within two hours.

Avoid the automatons
Speaking at the G-Force conference last month, Genesys vice president Robert Lattuca told the audience most of the group’s customers are still looking at new channels on a case-by-case basis, and typically only invest when a strong business case can be made.

“No one’s getting cases up without showing some return,” he said.

But Lattuca is hopeful large organisations are realising they need to interact with customers in a way that is culturally sensitive.

“It’s less about what am I going to get out of an interaction on Twitter or an interaction on Foursquare? The point is, if you create a culture inside your organisation that’s so vastly different to the culture of your customers, at some point, that’s going to crash up against you.”

The challenge then becomes training and rewarding staff that must work across multiple channels.

Jacobs says corporations should train call centre staff in written English and business communication. Gartner research shows call centre agents who are good at speaking with clients find it difficult to also excel at writing.
“If you are going to train your voice agents, train them in business writing skills. Don’t expect or assume that your voice person can write as well as they can speak,” says Jacobs.

But Cahill warns against being too concerned with perfecting written communication.

He says staff members that have posted in a professional and business-like manner on forums have in the past generated complaints about the use of auto-responders.

“Don’t get away from acronyms, don’t make them spell every word 100 per cent correctly. You don’t want customers to start to feel like it’s another automated response. It’s cold, it doesn’t engage and it’s a real challenge.”
Cahill says while it’s easy to build rapport and generate relationships with customers on the phone, email and other online channels are more challenging.

“If you’ve done something wrong, be open about it, don’t try and cover it up,” he says.

“We try and get our staff to post on forums and do tweet responses and email support in that way.”

iinet also pays staff that communictae across multiple channels more money. “They typically get paid more because they’ve got to have the knowledge from all of the functional verticals across the business. They need to know everything about the business in order to be effective with all the channels.”