| Contact Center/CRM Views and Analysis

March 2011

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The Dangers of Social Media Commentary

March 29, 2011

There is one cardinal rule of social media: that it is media. Anyone who comments on these sites and uses these tools is acting no differently than if they were facing a camera, have a mike in their face or are glancing at someone scribbling in a notebook. Employees or others who are acting on behalf of organizations who go on social media must have the same skills and discipline as those who appear on-camera, on the air and on the record.

I have been warning of the risks of having individuals who lack this training, discipline and experience, namely contact center agents, to go on social media.

More Reasons to Question Loyalty Programs

March 22, 2011

It is much more profitable to retain customers than to continually attract new ones. Yet I am deeply skeptical about customer loyalty programs to achieve that goal because the truest way to win and keep customers is by getting the fundamentals right. That is: consistently providing what customers want with high product/service quality and deliverability at the right price. Everything else is just a gimmick.

Are Contact Centers Supporting Customers Via Social Media?

March 7, 2011

According to an excellent recent blog entry by Tim Passios, Director of Solutions Marketing, Interactive Intelligence, not as many as may well be warranted by well-publicized incidents e.g. “United Breaks Guitars” .

Tim lists some very impressive social media statistics:

* Almost 640 million users of Facebook (SocialBakers)
* Over 90 million tweets a day
* Over 156 million blog sites (BlogPulse)

Tim wrote: “most contact centers just aren't feeling the absolute need to support it as a channel for now. As one of the customers I spoke with told me, "The majority of people are going to call you long before they are going to tweet or blog about bad customer service. Our job is to take care of that customer at the time they call and not give them a reason to use Social Media."

They, and Tim, have a point.









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