Web 2.0. You've heard of it. Maybe even dabbled in it personally. But is it right for your business? If you're very, very brave, chances are you're a veteran with it, marketing via social networking and building online communities. But for the rest of you, it might seem like a scary prospect.
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It shouldn't. And if you're not using at least some Web 2.0 technologies in your marketing, chances are you're being left behind by your competition. A new white paper by Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, entitled “Using Web 2.0 to Drive Exceptional Customer Experiences” outlines what Web 2.0 can do for you, and why you shouldn't be afraid of it.
As every marketer knows, it's all about customer engagement. Web 2.0 technologies are rapidly enabling entirely new forms of customer engagement. By intelligently integrating both phone and Web-based support channels with the robust communications capabilities made possible by Web 2.0, companies can deliver a new kind of customer experience — one that can transform customer service activities from line-item expenses into profitable, even revenue-generating, interactions. Web 2.0 tools allow companies to leverage the Web to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects. These tools include rich Internet applications such as blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking, and other online communities; the use of virtual assistants or avatars; and virtual worlds.
Web 2.0 is just kid stuff, right? Wrong. According to Forrester, the global enterprise Web 2.0 market will reach $4.6 billion in 2013, which represents a compound annual growth rate of 43 percent. Which means it's not just pre-teens using these technologies, but your customers as well. And if you're not there with them, you're losing out.
Integration is Key
By integrating multichannel customer service with Web 2.0 technologies, your business can improve the quality of your non-voice customer interactions and in the process reduce service costs, increase the possibilities for transforming service sessions into sales opportunities, increase market intelligence, and improve your bottom line. Integration, however, is the key word. The last thing most companies need is another source of formless data that is siloed, isolated and generates nothing except cost and effort. The difficulty is that, all too often, customer service and sales efforts are fragmented into such “silos” scattered throughout various functional departments and lines of business, with no visibility into previous customer interactions across different channels. Thanks to traditional, “siloed” organization, the quality of customer service delivery can be inconsistent, which leads to a number of problems, the most serious being customer dissatisfaction and the resulting churn.
By choosing Web 2.0 solutions from vendors that also provide integration services, you can enable cross-channel conversations that deliver a consistent experience as customers transition to non-voice channels in the most organized and streamlined way possible. By creating a single conversation over time ? across phone, Web, and mobile channels ? you can more effectively engage your customers, and meet growth and customer satisfaction objectives.
So What, Exactly, Is It?
So now you know why you need it. But what, exactly, is it that you need? For starters, the following Web 2.0 elements can help you get started engaging with your customers where they congregate.
Wikis: Wikis are Web sites that allow your customers to add and modify content for the purpose of reviewing, commenting or helping each other solve technical problems or answer questions.
Online communities: These online communities allow your customers to “gather” together virtually and communicate with one another, offering informal product support to each other or chat about shared issues. In these online communities, it is not uncommon for “super users” — customers who pride themselves on knowing your products, and who get satisfaction from answering others’ questions and troubleshooting their issues and problems — to present themselves. Says Genesys, consider offering your “super users” some kind of support: an online “badge” or official designation, or even some extra training.
Social networking: Maybe you do it at home, but it probably shouldn't stay at home. Companies can leverage social networks by creating interest groups around their products and services (think: “fans”) and by allowing network members to subscribe to and endorse these interest groups and help evangelize them. Thirty-five percent of adults now participate in some kind of online social networking, which means it's not a channel you can ignore anymore.
Virtual assistant: A virtual assistant is a computer-based video or three dimensional representation of a customer service “face” of the enterprise that assists customers by answering questions, offering guided step-based problem resolution, or providing instructions. It's a way of putting “a face” on your customer service. The search engine “Ask Jeeves” was an early successful example of this, and many companies have had success with virtual assistants since then.
More: There are other Web 2.0 technologies for smart companies to leverage as well, including widgets, mashups, Real Simple Syndication (RSS), avatars and crowdsourcing (a process that uses a variety of techniques to turn your customers into your volunteer support personnel).
The Benefits Aren't Limited to Your Customers
In addition to serving your customers the way they want to be served, according to Genesys, by integrating Web 2.0 into your customer contact, you are also helping yourself to a deep knowledge base that you can leverage to improve customer service in the long run. This part is important to keep in mind: once you enable the multichannel Web 2.0 conversation, you must capture all interactions with your customers across all channels and media so that you can “remember” them in each new conversation. This requires integration of all knowledge bases, user community activities and desktops, which in turn gives you the opportunity to customize service to meet each customer’s unique needs and have a true “cradle to grave” understanding of your customer. As they say, “knowledge is power.”
Sounds challenging? It is, but there is help available. There are a number of best practices you can employ to ensure you are speaking to customers with one voice despite the broad array of communications channels you may offer them. These include creating a single customer record that includes all interactions regardless of channel, setting up careful service level expectations and meeting them, monitoring agents equally across all channels, and creating standard response libraries to help you stay consistent in your message via all channels. For more details on best practices for an integrated message regardless of media, read Genesys' “Many Channels, One Voice.”
Using these Web 2.0 technologies, you are also enabling your internal customer-facing employees to share best practices, and to ensure continuity, collaboration and consistency when serving customers, regardless of where the employees are situated within the enterprise. When you arm your customer-facing employees with knowledge, you can improve the quality of customer care you offer. The end result is improved customer loyalty, improved operations and better access to the thoughts, needs and voices of your customers.
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