Left: Gatorade’s (Pepsico) Social Media Mission Control Center in Chicago listens and supports customers wherever they are in their lives. (Video, WSJ)
Customers have been blessed –and cursed– by call centers where customers call into customer support phone lines when they have woes to solve. Now, expect similar strategies to now use Social CRM technologies (read the report) to first listen to customers where they already are, and respond in real time. In fact we know of Gatorade being the first to launch their Mission Control center (see video below) and Dell’s head of Social Media, Manish Mehta, announced at our conference last week they are going to launch the Dell Social Media Mission Control center at their HQ.
How the Contact Center Evolves: Traditional to Social Media
Social media is not just a ‘new channel’ where existing processes are applied, there are significant changes required in approach or risk public customer backlash, support teams must be aware o f the following changes:
- Traditional Channels vs Social Channels: Rather than use traditional communication channels like phone, web, online chat, and email, Social Media support centers will reach customers where they already are –in social networks where they talk to each other.
- Inbound vs Outbound: Rather than waiting for customers to contact the contact center on phone support, web, or online chat, they are being proactive by listening to customers and responding to them in their own native social channels. Expect savvy brands to anticipate customers needs by using Social CRM databases to find trends, locate issues before they surface, then contacting customers before their issue surfaces.
- Post Issue vs Real Time Response: Call centers often occur once a customer has had a negative issue, and a frazzled or frustrated customer calls in. The goal of Social Support is for support agents to contact customers before they call the support center, reducing expensive high touchpoints.
- Incident Resolution Scripts vs Lifestyle Content: Call centers have one one primary mission and often a secondary: to solve customer woes and get them off the phone as quickly as possible to keep costs low, or flip to upsell opportunities. The contact agents script has been carefully designed to solve customer issues quickly and efficiently, yet, social media support may involve discussions and true dialog that build relationships with the customers beyond product support. Expect lifestyle content, news, industry happpenings, and even marketing deals to emerge in the same social channels to offer more value for customers.
- One-off Incidental Relationships vs Long Term Relationships: Contact center interactions often are short term, with different staff interacting with different customers with no long-term relationship building. In social media support, a handful of the same folks may participate in the social support efforts with their public persona appearing, this building a known relationship as a human with customers. See how regulated Wells Fargo does it right with their Ask Wells Fargo Twitter help account.
- Customer Support Skills vs Social Media Skills: While we’ve already seen a traditional skillset emerge for contact centers, expect a new skill set will be required to learn: brand monitoring tools, social media workflow, listening tools, social CRM training. Beyond the tools, they’ll have to learn conversational marketing, conversational support, and have a high degree of gut feeling to determine if an incident will need to be responded to. Furthermore, they’ll need to quickly ascertain the social influence of customers, as that will impact the triage process, that’s right, certain customers with more Twitter followers will receive priority treatment over others.
The Future: While Strategy Remains Constant, Expect Resurgence of Vendors and Measurement This isn’t a revolution but instead evolution, in fact both types of centers will focus on issue resolution and customer satisfaction rates. Both will have dedicated teams.Voices from customers cascade into social channels, and in both cases customers will likely share their experiences to their friends in social channels. Expect that contact centers in India and Philippines to quickly gain steam in this area, cut deals with one of the 145 brand monitoring companies, and offer these pilot programs to their clients. Lastly, expect that studies emerge that show the cost savings by heading off customer complaints early and responding to them before an incident goes ‘viral’ or reduction in low cost social channels vs higher cost call channels emerge.
Update Dec 11: Although Dell gave me an invite to come to the grand opening, I was unable to attend due to travel, they’ve now launched their Social Media Listening Command Center, see above.
Update: I kicked off a discussion in the growing Social CRM Pioneers Google Group –you’ll find the front line practitioners in here.
Social media mission control…real cool.
Raw design skills and Unity 3D delivered the heat for the gorgeous visualization crafted by StruckAxiom. Great job!
We have a live map feed that shows the location (in realtime) of each barcode scan of a Gatorade/Pepsi product. Usually one Pepsi product scan every 20-30 seconds in some part of the United States. Fun to watch, you should get Pepsi to add it to their mission control center. Email me at amuse@biggu.com
Jeremiah
This is a great post with some excellent content, comments and perspectives.
You are right about the matter of customer support, whether it is a call center, chat or using social media, when it comes to customer support it is about being wherever customers are. That is why in 1996 Dell established community forums and why along the way we established chat as customer support options. In our current situation, @dellcares is our customer support team across the social Web. Worth noting that this team and their tracking of issues is in fact part of Dell™s overall support offering¦it is not, to Martin Hill-Wilson™s point, something special or different or siloed within the organization. In this respect, social media is not some special channel¦it is among the many tools we use to connect with customers. Ultimately, whether it is the call center telephone call, our community forums, chat, email or @dellcares in social media, it is all about what Dell™s customers choose.
In addition, I think it is worth noting that the social media mission control is not just about contact centers or customers with support issues “ or at least that is not the sole purpose behind Dell™s social media Ground Control Center.
Our new Ground Control is about tracking the largest number possible conversations across the Web and making sure we internalize that feedback “ good and bad. For example, today, we might be tracking conversations about new bamboo packaging and how that is being talked about by customers or other stakeholders interested in our sustainability initiatives; tomorrow it may be tracking a number of fans and what they are loving about one of Dell™s new mobility products or how the Dell streak is successfully being used in the healthcare environment; next week, it may be about early-warning conversations for a blue tooth driver issue; or about some tremendous new successes in successful green data centers and storage integrations.
Dell™s Ground Control is also about getting that information to the right people wherever they are in the Dell organization, globally and functionally. It™s also about tracking what you might call the long tail¦.those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there¦and deserve to be heard. We want to hear them too “ contrary to the scenarios about squeaky wheels getting grease
Hope that adds some additional context to the great conversations, perspectives and thoughts here.
This inspired us to do our own mini control center at GOSO – http://www.flickr.com/photos/mygoso/4921494710/in/set-72157624596570766/ Gatorade did such an amazing job, it's just awesome!
Actually, working for a social media monitoring company based in Paris, I can say that there is just as much emphasis placed on “influencers” as in the U.S. (I'm an American), and what's different is sometimes a person may be referred to as an “influencer” and thus treated differently because they stand out in the blogosphere, not because they necessarily have an affinity for a certain brand. VIP treatment, then, is something that is not unknown here.
Great discussion here, as always Jeremiah, and I have to turn to Forrester for their great explanation of the future of call centers representing one voice of the customer. Whether a customer calls in, or sends a Tweet, or contacts a company through their contact form, there should be one place that unites all these points of contact to unify the person™s multiple identities. It™s something we are working on at Synthesio, integrating internal data and external data so that there is not a disconnect as there currently is in many companies between someone needing help in social media and someone needing help outside of social media.
Whether the person is an influencer or not, then, remains to be seen after having united all of these factors to see if the person is a valuable customer which indeed is nothing new. I agree with you, Jeremiah, that preferred customers are preferred customers, with or without social media.
I agree with Martin, however, that the skills aren™t necessarily entirely different for customer service vs. social media skills ; it™s just an evolution that has been occurring and will continue to occur. Orange in France, for example, took members of their customer service team and trained them for responding to web conversations in forums. This meant that the community managers are already have the company™s DNA in them and can respond accordingly, while being sensitive to the different particularities of web interaction. Their team has grown over the past year and they have, indeed, been able to detect problems much more quickly on social media than through customer service calls, saving several millions of euros over the past year and a half.
I don™t think that there will be a trade-off, then, between traditional and social channels, but rather a blending of the 2, allowing contact via whichever channel the customer prefers.
have you recently released the “social support” finding? best and worse practices?