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Contact Centers Need to Experiment

By Jerry Olsen

Contact center managers across the country are looking for new and innovative ways for creating a social contact center within their organization. But for the time being, contact center managers must design their own scheme for adding social channels into their place of business.

Keith Dawson, industry director at Frost and Sullivan in New York said, “There is a distinct lack of consensus on what social media even means and how it should be handled.” However, Dawson added that there are enough resources available to help get a social initiative off the ground. Contact center managers need to set initial guidelines and resources, and then make adjustments accordingly.

Sheila McGee-Smith, president of McGee-Smith Analytics in Amherst, New Hampshire said, “If you have anyone on social channels today, you are ahead of the curve. There are few companies that have lots of people resources allocated and a structured program.”

The following are some guidelines for establishing a social contact center within your organization:

First of all, you’ll need to determine how to make use of social channels in the contact center. It may sound simple, but it can be challenging to figure out which channels are appropriate until the contact center starts engaging in the process. At a minimum, managers must determine how to respond more appropriately in order to engage customers.

According to Kate Leggett, a senior analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “You need guidelines of engagement for what information you should be able to convey over public channels.” For many companies, social initiatives are already under way, and the analysts are saying that contact centers only need to figure out how the fit into the plan.