After attending a number of conferences, and meeting with multiple customers recently, it is clear that the big topic in customer service discussions currently is social media and its impact on how companies provide customer service. How can Plantronics be relevant in these discussions?
Companies are under greater pressure than ever to deliver great service, with customers resorting quickly to telling friends and acquaintances about their issues over social media if they don’t get the service they expect. There are many examples around of companies experiencing problems with social media, the majority of these arise when companies deliver poor service through existing channels such as the contact centre.
Companies have three options to help them deliver better service and ensure that customers complaints on social media platforms are minimised
1) train all agents, or recruit new agents so that the skill level rises across the organization, ensuring no escalation or call backs are needed, and every problem can be solved on the first call
2) implement real time speech analytics that listens to the customer and agent, and give prompts to the agents on what to say next
3) utilize the companies unified communications system to reach out to easily identified experts in the back office and use their expertise to answer customer questions
Across all three categories, our heritage in audio quality is still vital to customers. You can’t deliver good customer service if you can’t be heard, so headsets such as the EncorePro that features the best noise cancelling in its class, can offer companies a clear advantage in delivering good service.
The primary route that companies are investigating is three – the use of unified communications to reach the back office. Currently, companies are using the instant messaging portion of UC to access the back office, however to get the best results, they should move to real time voice communication with the customer and back office conversing directly and the agent acting as an enabler.
By using a Plantronics Savi with its unique mixing feature, the agent can bring together the customer on the phone and the back office on UC, creating a three way conversation that ensures delivery of great service. The agent also gets the benefit of listening in to the solution, giving them ad-hoc training and skill improvement that helps contribute to better agent retention, and they get to complete the customer call record showing first call resolution was achieved (many back office staff do not have the access to systems to do this).
The presentation below gives an overview of this scenario