Social media strategy links to customer service and marketing

Alcatel-Lucent Genesys maps out successful social media strategy for enterprises that includes strong linkage between customer service and marketing

Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled the Genesys Social Media Strategy that urges companies to aggressively bring social media practices to the next level by using business tools to tie social media community interactions with customer service and marketing organisations.

Consumers expect companies to engage with them via social media and while almost every company has made an attempt to establish such a presence it is typically done manually in standalone deployments and in response to consumer queries and complaints. The lack of an enterprise-wide social media strategy and engaging with consumers only, in a department-by-department basis, contribute to a poor consumer experience and ultimately undermine brand advocacy and loyalty.

"For the past few years social media has impacted the way companies communicate with consumers and their employees, resulting mainly in the leveraging of Facebook and/or Twitter as another channel to distribute press releases and other marketing material," commented Brian Riggs, Research Director, Enterprise Software and Communications at Current Analysis. "As enterprises approach to social media matures, it will be critical for them to invest in tools that allow them to integrate social media efforts across marketing, communications and the contact centre and directly impact revenues and operational expenses."

The Alcatel-Lucent Genesys Strategy encourages enterprises to construct an integrated social media approach that builds on four actions:

1. Listen:  Capture and leverage community / tribal knowledge to gain valuable insight into consumer sentiments about products, services and emotional engagement with the brand
2. Prioritise:  Define and prioritise what actions to take toward the community, individual posts or within the enterprise
3. Engage:  Proceed with relevant actions to respond, inform and notify individuals as appropriate while focusing resources on consumers of particular value to the company
4. Integrate:  Integrate conversations across marketing and customer service organisations and other touch points while leveraging expertise across the broader enterprise and existing IT investments

Genesys has started to integrate tools into its offerings to help enterprises begin to create a foundation for a strong cross-functional approach to social media. A few of these will be shown at G-Force Melbourne including:

• New upgrades that integrate with Facebook and Twitter to respond, inform and notify consumers while leveraging Genesys’ market-leading customer interaction management (CIM) platform to direct and route messages to the most appropriate resource.
• A community building platform from Lithium Technologies that allows enterprises to monitor and address consumer issues outside of the traditional contact centre. When combined with the Genesys Contact Centre/Customer Service Software, agents are given visibility into valuable community content and consumers can easily navigate from a self-help area to a live agent.
• Ability to integrate social monitoring through an open interface, facilitating the ability to listen to and capture content from consumers on social sites. Genesys software then manages, prioritises, escalates, assigns service level agreements (SLAs) and routes the interactions to the best possible resource.

According to a 2010 study by the Society of New Communications Research, "72 per cent of respondents said they used social media to research a company’s reputation for customer care before making a purchase, and 74 per cent choose to do business with companies based on the customer care experiences shared by others online." With such large percentages of consumers using social media to acquire knowledge about a company to form a purchase decision, it is critical that companies integrate social media into their marketing and customer service business.
 
"As more consumers use social media there is an increasing desire to engage with businesses," said Eric Tamblyn, Vice President, Genesys Product Marketing at Alcatel-Lucent. "Marketing and customer service departments are both challenged with supporting these new touch points and retaining consumer information collected if the conversation extends to other departments.

By leveraging the Genesys solution’s ability to optimise interactions across voice and non-voice touch points, businesses can proactively market and provide consistent customer service via Web applications, phone or mobile devices, delivering an exceptional experience for their consumers."