Yesterday, ContactBabel released their annual 'Contact Center Decision Makers' Guide', a must-read for anyone on the market for customer service software. These are the 10 key things we recommend you look for in an effective, secure, and scalable social customer service solution:
Context: Social customer service software needs to provide prior interaction history to give agents a full context of the customers issue. A complete action history, of both private and public messages, gives your agents greater context of the customers outreach, resulting in more educated engagement and issue resolution.
Prioritization: Social media is full of noise, making it difficult for agents to identify the sensitive issues that matter to your brand. Ensure your social customer service software applies intelligent prioritization to incoming messages, enabling agents to respond to 'higher risk' issues first.
Workflow: With the high incoming
message volumes social media brings, agents and managers need to work seamlessly to balance workload and avoid duplication of effort. Therefore it is essential to choose a social customer service software that has an approval work flow, ensuring adherence to process and reducing risk of error.
Real-time Analytics: Real-time analytics are key to continually monitoring the SLA and KPI performance of agents, as well as providing an early indicator for issues that might require involvement of other departments. Additionally, social customer service software should provide historical insights into trends over time to deliver actionable insight for your business.
Security: Regardless of industry, comprehensive safeguards need to be in place to ensure information security and regulatory compliance. Look for a software that provides role-based permissions, an approval workflow, IP locking and a fully searchable, exportable archive.
Integration: In order to achieve a single view of the customer, it is vital to choose a social customer service software with a full set of APIs. This allows you to surface social information through your CRM systems and contact center technologies, providing a single view of the customer.
Proactive Customer Service: Proactive customer service provides the opportunity to surprise and delight customers, calling out to them when they indirectly mention your brand or use related terms. Brands using tools that only process direct @mentions are likely to miss service issues, or potential sales opportunities. A tool that provides proactive searches over social will broaden your scope for engagement, meaning you don't miss a conversation opportunity.
Expertise: Although social customer service as a business operation is relatively new still, market experience does exist. Choose a partner capable of helping to implement a scalable social customer service operation in alignment with business requirements and industry best practices.
