{"id":527,"date":"2014-06-02T17:00:23","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T17:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/socialagendamedia.com\/digital-pr-blog\/?p=527"},"modified":"2014-06-02T17:02:10","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T17:02:10","slug":"customer-service-new-marketing-goes-social-data-centric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/socialagendamedia.com\/digital-pr-blog\/customer-service-new-marketing-goes-social-data-centric\/","title":{"rendered":"Customer Service Is The New Marketing. It Goes Further, Is More Social & Data Centric"},"content":{"rendered":"

The customer is the \u201cproduct\u201d every business wants to buy. Unfortunately, today\u2019s customer is disenchanted, discouraged and doubtful about every form of advertising, so you\u2019re left with customer service. Customer retention and advocacy is the new marketing game. Let\u2019s find out from our virtual panel how the game is played and what technologies are out there today to support it: Ryan Hollenbeck, Senior Vice President, Marketing\u00a0at Verint Systems<\/a>, Ilya Bodner, Chief Revenue Officer\u00a0at\u00a0The Shipyard<\/a>, Hamza Nasir, Director Strategic Relations\u00a0at LiveAdmins<\/a>, and Jeh Daruvala, CEO at Yactraq<\/a>.<\/p>\n

SocialAgenda Media: Today companies must think long-term reputation vs. short-term profit. The mantra is to <\/i>\u201c<\/i>be available<\/i>\u201d<\/i>, therefore the quality of customer service becomes more important than ever. What challenges will customer-centric companies be facing in the next few years and how should technology evolve to address them?<\/i>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ryan Hollenbeck: <\/strong>\u00a0Consumers are more informed and knowledgeable about products and services than ever before. In fact, they prefer polling their trusted peers for their views and using self-service for information where they can get it. With this knowledge come higher expectations when interacting with organizations. Social media has also given the consumers\u2019 voice unexpected power, driving them to expect companies not only to listen but proactively seek out their feedback.<\/p>\n

These consumers are expecting fast, efficient service.\u00a0 They want easy engagement through flexible, integrated channels, consistent service across those channels and they expect their information to be protected every step of the way.\u00a0 They want organizations to understand their complex needs and to engage with them personally.<\/p>\n

Quality Monitoring\u00a0helps organizations capture, evaluate, and learn from customer interactions, including voice conversations, email, Web chat sessions, and more. This software combines monitoring and recording functionality with\u00a0performance management,\u00a0analytics, eLearning, and\u00a0coaching, helping use data captured from the telephone, email, and Web to increase revenue, enhance customer satisfaction, and manage performance, processes, and costs.<\/p>\n

Ilya Bodner:\u00a0<\/strong> Offshoring has given a bad name to customer service. \u00a0Just the other day I was sitting over a cup of coffee with another entrepreneur who was telling me about their Live Chat experience with a major insurance company – he was frustrated with the fact that he wasn’t sure if “Mindy” on the other end was really a “Mindy” in the United States. \u00a0Winning over the trust of consumers is proving to be tough, and companies that are doing it right do innovative things like announcing the location of the center you are being transferred to, using the area code of the inbound caller to match with the closest agent to that area, leveraging skill-based routing to match the most “relevant” account executive with the customer and his\/her request.<\/p>\n

Hamza Nasir:<\/strong> The internet has created an open economy, which gives rise to competition and an equal opportunity to compete. This lets a regular mom and pop shop rise up against conglomerates, as the internet provides an open battlefield regardless of size.<\/p>\n

Due to competition and USPs becoming closer and harder to differentiate, products and services are increasingly becoming similar. This inevitably gives rise to the service culture, as that becomes the only differentiating factor.<\/p>\n

Considering this landscape, companies need to be closer to the customers than ever. This requires organizations to forecast and understand the customers, their growing needs and have a thorough listening approach to doing business.<\/p>\n

The biggest challenge that businesses will face would be of omni-presence, and being available on each and every platform where their consumers are present. Businesses need to know where the target audience is, and create custom target audience profiles that target various segmentations according to their various tastes and preferences.<\/p>\n

Apart from presence alone – availability and responsiveness are key to providing an outstanding customer experience. With examples of banks (Halo BCA) and even airlines (American Airlines) responding to their customer with above 90% accuracy and within 3 minutes (Twitter), leaves competitors with little or no room for slack.<\/p>\n

These kind of expectations have been possible due to technology as well as awareness, and a growing culture that revolves around the consumer, is empowering the user.<\/p>\n

The rules remain the same. The platforms differ.<\/p>\n

On the user side, brands need to engage their audience intelligently. Competition allows users to switch easily, with better options and features being offered every single day. With examples like Google and Facebook constantly researching and adapting to engage, maintain, increase and even create new market share, these are only the stepping stones towards a more educated audience who is empowered to make their own decisions.<\/p>\n

Technology is based on the principle of saving time. With the exponential growth of social and web, it is inevitable that the modern consumer will continue to be more informed and open to change. Businesses need to be more agile, open to differentiation and keep a close eye on how consumer demands are shifting.<\/p>\n

Mobile and social are the future, and no longer just a choice. Businesses need to leverage tech to listen closer and better, and make decisions accordingly. Tech itself on the other hand needs to continue to support presence on various platforms and keeping in line the adaptation ratio. An example of this would be the switch to E-governments in the past 20 years, 50% of which failed completely or partially.<\/p>\n

The flip side would be the rise of big data and the ability to process this information and provide meaningful results that would allow organizations to react better and faster, from as basic as identifying the priority of where the consumers are and anticipated demands, to as broad as measuring the potential reactions based on locations and how to cater to a potential shift in real time. Listening remains key, and a higher level of agility is paramount.<\/p>\n

Jeh Daruvala: <\/strong>Quality customer service has always been about high touch and high tech.\u00a0 The confluence of accelerating artificial intelligence capabilities with fast growing audio & video networks makes cognitive computing increasingly accessible, even to mid-sized businesses. This is an opportunity to reimagine customer service for competitive advantage.<\/p>\n

SocialAgenda Media: Some businesses are even taking customer service a step further into <\/i>\u201c<\/i>social<\/i>\u201d<\/i>by turning their most satisfied clients into advocates and online sales reps.<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>What technologies power such a transition and how can they evolve to make helpdesk truly social?<\/i>
\n<\/strong>
\nRyan Hollenbeck: <\/strong>\u00a0One of the biggest challenges facing organizations is to balance critical and\u2014at times\u2014conflicting business objectives: maximizing customer satisfaction and increasing revenue, while minimizing the cost of delivering an outstanding customer experience. Voice of the Customer Analytics solutions provide the tools needed to transform these seemingly divergent goals into complementary ones.<\/p>\n

These solutions analyze information from customer interactions regardless of the channel\u2014calls to the call center, emails, chat, Tweets, surveys, etc. Voice of the Customer Analytics solutions include:<\/p>\n