Is Twitter the Next Channel for Contact Centers?
If you have never seen this web page http://twitter.zappos.com/ - you should! With legions of Twitter-ers on staff - 432 to be exact - Zappos make customer service look: easy, decentralized, and inexpensive. But that begs the question - what impact will Twitter have on today’s customer contact centers?
History would tell us that just like the days when ATM’s were first being rolled out and people were declaring that the bank teller was soon to be extinct, that this never really materialized fully. In fact quite the opposite was true – banks ended up building more physical locations and support both channels! Channels yield choices!
So does that mean for every new channel that gets launched we need a separate grouping of customer service reps to handle it in our Contact Centers? Maybe not – but a certainly a portion of Contact Center experts can and should be trained in responding real time with Twitter.
Progressive companies are learning to integrate social interaction technologies to monitor brands today in real-time. It’s quite early in it’s use, but social technologies will continue to drive their way into brand management over the next 2 years and become a core part of companies overall strategy when it comes to Contact Centers. At least successful ones for sure!
Twitter will be another feed along with IM and Email into a Contact Center (support questions may even be crowdsourced by non-CC employees) and will be one more channel that agents will have to deal with. Much like chat and SMS the era of communications becoming more and more synchronous is upon us. And the race is on for how fast you can respond to your customers needs.
Posted by Paul Dunay at 16:41 on June 04, 2009
Stu Goldstein said..
Posted at 14:21 on August 19, 2009
I agree the next generation of consumers will require the business they are researching or about to interact with to have a multi-channel strategy that supports social media.
Will the routing and reporting be handled in a CRM package like SFDC or in a multi-channel engine like Interaction Center or Contact Center Express?
Dave Ward said..
Posted at 19:42 on July 16, 2009
I do agree with Paul regarding Twitter- or some Twitter like application- being the next communication channel into the call center. This will be driven by a young tech culture- Generation Net- who has adopted IMing and Texting as an alternate form of communication that compliments the “verbal” face-to-face and the on-the-phone communication that us generation X’ers live or die by.
What Generation Net has learned to do is communicate through multiple channels all at the same time very efficiently and effectively almost like a finely tuned multiplexer. Now if we can only plug them into a USB device they are set! It is this generation’s no-boundary attitude that will drive our services into new areas that we never considered 10 years ago like using twitter in the call center!
Dave Ward