Maybe you’re a social media manager, or a CEO or a marketing director. Social will mean different things to each of you. I spent an afternoon recently with the team from Oracle and I’ve learnt a few things that I wanted to share.
Organisations have an opportunity to use Social Media in a range of ways. The key thing I picked up during this meeting with Oracle was the idea that the customer service team are no longer just a post-sale team. Prospects and customers are contacting your customer service team for a range of reasons.
If our paradigm views customer service as a post-sale team, we do them and those who contact them a disservice. The customer service team has the ability to influence prospects and customers and their buying decisions. However, if their view of the world is “I’m not in sales”, that’s a problem.
A discussion between the VP of Service and VP of Sales
In the video above, we see what could be a typical discussion taking place in your organisation. Each of the VP’s has their own set of pressures, however each VP’s team can go a lot further to helping each other.
How can Social Media help?
I’m a great advocate for Social, however for those who read my blog regularly they may get the impression I’m not the biggest fan. Not so. My experience tells me that Social is just one of the many channels available to us to engage or communicate with prospects and customers. It’s not a solution in and of itself.
If you’re not including social in your contact centre, if social is not integrated into your website, then you’re missing a growing channel that people are choosing as a way to engage.
How do I include Social Media in my Customer Experience (CX) Strategy?
The answer probably depends on the size of your budget. The key players i.e. Oracle Corporation and salesforce.com have social media solutions to help you Listen, Monitor & Engage and Market via Social Media.
Your customer service team can be cross trained to ensure they’re in a good position to talk with both prospects and customers. The next step is having the right technology in place to support your contact centre team.
Oracle’s Service Cloud (RightNow) provides a full suite of social and web enabled tools to help contact centre staff engage and maintain that engagement history for your organisation.
The image above shows the breadth of contact channels i.e. Web, Social and Contact Centre underpinned by the Engage platform while the whole solution sits in the cloud. Oracle Social Cloud dominates in a number of areas in Australia, higher ed is just one of them.
Integration is Key
Oracle Service Cloud is integrated with Oracle Social Cloud (Social Relationship Management) which enables Community Managers to take social discussions and generate service requests which can be directed to the Service Cloud for resolution by the Contact Centre team if required.
In addition, Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM) offers integration across the various Oracle Cloud solutions. My experience is that the CRM should generally be the source of truth for all customer interactions. Some back office solution may feed data into the CRM, however the CRM is the best place for staff to trust the data they’re looking at.
There is room for Social to be included in your Customer Experience (CX) Strategy
Should Social be at the centre of your CX strategy? Probably not, that space should be reserved for the customer. However, ensuring your organisation has the tools in place to engage with prospects and clients in a way they choose, is key.
