The more I look into social media, the more angles I see for contact centers, and this is the second part of a series on the topic. My first article touched on a few key themes, and I’ll continue that here by exploring one in greater depth. As the title states, “unintended consequences” is a very real outcome of many social media initiatives, with specific implications for contact centers.

So, what are these unintended consequences? Imagine you’re the Marketing Director, and either you or your advertising agency has decided it’s time to use social media to give your brand a re-fresh. Your competitors are doing it, and even though you’re not really sure if it’s working for them, you can’t stand pat. To get started, you follow the usual paths – setting up a Facebook page, tasking a few web savvy keeners to start Twitter feeds, getting a few of your thought leaders to post on the corporate blog, etc.

To get the viral buzz started, you do a series of outbound messages to your customers, and maybe even use a third party database targeted at your market. You might even do some advertising or sponsorship to get the word out that you’re social media-friendly now. Just to be sure you generate the maximum response, you’ve contracted with a 22 year-old whiz who has mastered the science of SEO planning. Ready, set, go.

The Internet works in weird and wonderful ways and before you know it, interesting conversations start happening everywhere – with customers, prospects, ex-customers, and people who just like to use social media. Your sales team is excited by all these new leads that are appearing out of nowhere, and Marketing’s star is rising by virtue of all this profile you’ve created for the brand.

Corporate management doesn’t really get social media, but they understand metrics, and you can quickly point to the benchmarks of success – number of website visits, tweets, re-tweets, likes, sharing, etc. Furthermore, you can quantify how much new visibility you’ve generated for company, as well as how quickly the results were achieved. Clearly, this is more cost-effective and faster than conventional campaigns that rely on print and mass media messaging. Well done.

Maybe so, but along the way, some wrinkles pop up that you hadn’t accounted for. Social media may work quickly and cost very little, but is also fosters intimacy, especially among customers. Social media users tend to feel very comfortable with the tools, and online communication is as intuitive for them as talking on the phone. There is a level of personalization with social media that makes it easy for people to open up, even when not prompted; and that brings us to unintended consequences.

For some, it will be during their first social media interaction, and for others it will come later. Either way, this marketing (and sales) channel will be viewed by many as an open feedback channel, and during the process of talking about the company’s products, other things will be triggered for customers. In most cases, since Marketing is running the social media program, they will be monitoring the conversations. After all, the expected inputs will be marketing-related, and really not relevant to others in the company. Social media monitoring isn’t usually a full time role, so this task may fall to a junior staffer or even an intern.

Regardless, when a marketing-related comment triggers other ideas, the dialog is still handled by the same person. In these cases, customers will often switch course and start talking about issues or problems they have with the product, or even the company itself. They could just as likely posit technical inquiries, or ask about product usage, warranty coverage, return policies, where the closest location is, etc. The list is endless, and clearly, with the open nature of social media, Marketing is more likely to receive inquiries that are outside their domain than within it.

These are the unintended consequences that come with social media, and they are only a problem if not properly planned for and managed. While companies are always open to unsolicited feedback, they must have the right staffing and processes in place. By now, it should be evident that these unintended consequences are really contact center inquiries coming into the company via Marketing. This will be new for most companies, and presents two separate but inter-related challenges.

First is the issue of determining which social media inquiries need to be routed from Marketing to the contact center, and second comes a wide range of challenges around how these inquiries are managed by the contact center. There are a host of questions around each of these, and they warrant fuller treatment in future postings. However, I will highlight some key issues here to provide the broader context of the dynamics between Marketing and contact centers.

During the course of my research, I spoke with Tod Famous, a contact center Product Line Manager at Cisco. Marketing personnel are generally not trained to know which inquiries are best handled by the contact center, and most companies do not have clear policies around how to handle social media inquiries. Furthermore, for campaigns generating a high volume of social media traffic, automated tools and processes really are needed.
 
This type of scenario is tailor made for Cisco’s SocialMiner, an application I follow in my coverage of Unified Communications. Other vendors offer comparable solutions, but the main idea here is having a purpose-built application for social media that uses predefined keywords to proactively identify queries that should be routed to the contact center. Once Marketing and the contact center determine the proper criteria, SocialMiner would then automatically stream inquiries to the contact center queue. This addresses the first challenge of getting inquiries routed to the right places.

Having done that, SocialMiner get these inquiries in the right hands, at which point they can be integrated with CRM applications, enabling the contact center to do the best job possible. While this sounds like a neat and tidy ending, it’s actually just the beginning. Another unintended consequence is that social media queries are routed to the contact center through the back door. SocialMiner may add them to the overall queue, but this is new traffic that the contact center didn’t generate, nor ask for. Depending on how much the contact center embraces social media, this traffic may not be welcome, and may be treated as a lower priority.

Clearly, there are workload and workflow implications here, and applications like SocialMiner only help in getting the ball rolling. What contact centers really need are advanced analytics to fully parse the nature of these inquiries and determine how best to respond. By its nature, social media is both unstructured and unfiltered, neither of which fit the rules-based systems used by contact centers. New tools are needed to intelligently convert these raw inquiries into actionable and measurable outcomes. This space is very much a work in progress, but will be welcomed, as contact centers know that they can’t leave this up to agents to make arbitrary judgments on these inquiries.

There is exciting and rich potential for social media, but contact centers must understand the nature of these unintended consequences to realize it. I’ve really just touched on a few issues here, but hopefully enough to get you thinking about what this means for your operations. There’s more to come, and I’ll continue this theme in my next posting.