Social media has become a popular and dynamic platform for communication, conversation, and sharing. But now, with more than two thirds of the world's population visiting social networking sites, it has become an immensely important means of communication for both individuals and businesses. Increasingly, as individuals become more comfortable with sharing their own experiences with products and services, social sites are being seen as customer service platforms that could be a game-changer for customer engagement.
Does this mean that the traditional contact center is becoming obsolete? Not at all. However, it does underscore how important it is for businesses and organizations to provide customer care in the manner in which customers wish to be served and, given the increasingly fast-paced society in which we live, in real-time. This idea extends far beyond what many have termed the "multi-channel contact center" and into the realm of what Cisco calls Customer Collaboration.
Just as today's consumers use a variety of methods to obtain service, customer collaboration applies a diverse range of collaboration and communication technologies that enable businesses to forge deeper relationships with their customers, strengthening overall loyalty and generating additional revenue.
A social, more collaborative approach to customer relationship management allows organizations to do just this via three areas: gaining customer information from public sources, saving and organizing this information for employees, and providing employees with a more personalized work environment to analyze and use the information.
Consider first the explosion of the social web. From Twitter to Facebook to YouTube, the public is engaging in an ever-increasing number of online conversations and interactions, and organizations are just beginning to realize the full value that these conversations create -- both as an opportunity to gain business intelligence and as an avenue for providing customer care.
Proactive social customer care can provide enterprises with real-time access to customer conversations occurring on the social web. Tweets, forum posts, or blogs from customers can be monitored in real time, alerting enterprises about conversations related to their brand and providing them with rich, meaningful information. This will not only improve companies' business intelligence but also help them proactively engage with customers that require service.
The social web is one example of real-time intelligence (like a tweet) driving improved customer care. Another area where Customer Collaboration adds value to businesses is through the capture and analysis of relevant, real-time customer conversations. By keeping contact center agents and supervisors up-to-date with relevant information regarding customer interactions through a media recording and processing solution, businesses can more quickly and accurately turn this real-time intelligence into significant, long-term business intelligence. Contact centers handle thousands of customer conversations a day, but, unfortunately, much of the intelligence from those conversations is lost. However, with a network-based capture solution an enterprise can economically capture all customer conversations and implement analytics solutions to mine those customer conversations to improve business intelligence, thereby increasing agent productivity and effectiveness.
Finally, Customer Collaboration allows organizations to analyze and use the information they gain in a meaningful way. Through next-generation agent and supervisor desktops' integration with enterprise social software and real-time analytics, businesses can develop a personalized work environment that has all the power and capability of a traditional "thick client" application with the rich, network-based solutions that cut costs and improve efficiencies. More importantly, however, this new agent desktop would provide a single, customizable cockpit that enables the customer care provider to seamlessly leverage multiple assets and information sources to assist customers.
Customer collaboration enables businesses and organizations to escape from the largely-reactive mode of traditional call centers and instead embrace a much more proactive engagement model with their customers, a move that will undoubtedly make them more competitive in their respective marketplace.