I’m continuing my exploration here on how social media is impacting contact centers, and a strong theme that came out in my research was listening. While social media is very much a product of today’s technologies, it speaks to the essence of human communication, and in the business world, I would argue this matters most in the contact center. Ironically, social media gives us tools to communicate more efficiently, but with so many modes at our disposal, we suffer from information overload. This makes it harder than ever to pay attention and of course, listen. We may be very good at capturing content via search, tags, hyperlinks, etc., but many nuances will be missed if we don’t know how to listen.

We often listen without paying attention, and that’s becoming the norm – which does not bode well for our long-term survival. It’s fairly easy to listen when you’re just talking on the phone, but the task is much harder when you add IM, email, chat, etc. on top of that conversation. Social media introduces a host of new modes into the contact center, and with that comes a whole new dimension of communications that can tell us far more than we ever knew before about our customers. However, this will be just noise if you don’t have the tools to analyze it, or your agents don’t have the skills to listen effectively.
 
At minimum, agents need to listen to the conversation at face value and respond accordingly. This is the easy part of listening, and things get more challenging when social media comes into the picture. In addition to this, agents must carefully follow any other modes being used, especially when they’re concurrent. On one level, the agent must listen to what is being said that’s directly related to the inquiry, whether a problem, a general inquiry or a tech support call. That said, social media brings a sense of intimacy and informal communication that doesn’t often happen with a conventional inquiry.

Depending on the agent’s comfort level using social media, the dialog could easily veer into other areas, especially if the inquiry came into the contact center via the back door from a marketing program. In this scenario, the conversation will go off script and start to look more like a casual IM session. When this occurs, the agent may have few guidelines to respond effectively, and the contact center may not have the right analytics in place to gain useful insights. At this point, the value of the call may ride heavily on the agent’s ability to respond on the fly, and that’s not a good way to run a contact center.

Compounding this is the fact that the quality of listening determines the quality of response. Younger agents in particular may be savvy social media users outside of work, but in the contact center, they represent their company and need to be professional. As such, they must understand that while customers may be conversing with them (often in casual language) about an issue using social media, they may very well also be talking about you – and your company – and their products – with all their contacts and communities – even in real time during the inquiry.

Clearly, listening is important for the agent, and if they don’t pay attention or say the wrong things, the contact center could be quickly forced into damage control mode. Everything is amplified in terms of both scale and speed with social media, and if agents revert to casual chat they may unwittingly set off a chain reaction of unintended events.

For the contact center, there are two key implications here. First is the need to properly train agents and hire ones with the right skills for social media. In this regard, social media brings an added operational cost, but it’s necessary to get good value in return. Second is the need for contact center management to also develop a new set of listening skills. Just as agents need to listen carefully to customers, supervisors need to do the same with their agents. To some extent they can do this the old fashioned way, but analytics has a key role to play here.

The key to getting good results with social media is rapid response, especially in terms on knowing who you’re communicating with. With the right tools, agents – and supervisors – should be able to quickly determine the customer’s social media profile – their circle of contacts, their level of activity, their degree of being an opinion leader, etc. This is a critical capability, since not all social media-based inquiries are created equally. Analytics software should be able to readily identify which inquiries need to be handled with great care, and in fact, nurtured. Opinion leaders can be very valuable to a company, and their inquiries present an opportunity to engage with them offline for other things, such as providing input on new product ideas.

Not only must supervisors listen to manage these types of customers, but they must also listen effectively enough to know when it’s time to intervene or coach the agent. In some cases, this may mean continuing on a public session, but in others, the supervisor will try to move the dialog offline to a more controlled environment.

In this regard, an experienced supervisor should have better instincts than a new agent, and this can help prevent a borderline call from becoming a viral embarrassment for the company. The challenge here is that so much social media activity is unfiltered, but over time, analytics can apply heuristic principles to build up a database of trigger words that can provide those critical alerts for supervisors.

From a contact center management perspective, using the right types of analytics for social media must be given careful consideration. To some extent, existing workforce management applications can be used in this context, but if social media is a high priority, you will likely need more purpose-built solutions. This raises an important issue in that social media is a rapidly-evolving phenomenon, and while the basic role of a contact center agent remains the same, the nature of their work is changing.
 
As such, you may well face a decision about deploying new applications for social media, and if so, you will also need a plan for integrating these with your workforce management tools. Otherwise, you risk having separate tools to monitor the conventional way agents work, as well as for how their work is evolving today. Given the widespread use of workforce management tools, this requires further exploration, and I’ll address that in my next posting.

To conclude here, listening may be about the spoken word in a literal sense, but in today’s multichannel contact center, it applies to all the modes. With social media, agents need to listen not just to what is being said, but how as well. Customers feel empowered with social media, and can take a bolder stance with their problems, with an unspoken set of consequences if they don’t get a quality resolution. This is part of the double edged sword of social media, but with an active listening strategy, contact centers can leverage it to great advantage.