
In the good old days, if we had to contact our bank or for that matter any business, we used to reach out to our phones and give them a call.
The call would then be routed to a call center (usually, after about 10-15 minutes of listening to some music that would be played while we waited for an agent to get free and take our call).
This, of course would be after having had to find our way through the maze of options (which used to be so complicated that it required us to be entirely focused on the options, blacking out everything else in life).
Then the times changed. Emails got ubiquitous and we could write an email to contact with the business. However, we still used the phone as the primary means for contacting someone at the business who could help us solve whatever it was that we were trying to solve.
The businesses still continued to invest in the contact center (some continued to have this in-house, while most of them out-sourced this to some organization in India or Phillipines or wherever they could get the lowest cost labor).
Then the times changed again! The social media revolution started and we got Facebook, twitter and all the other social media tools. The marketing teams in all these businesses wanted to ride on this wave and created twitter handles for their organizations.
This was an important moment!
People now could tweet their complaints to these businesses directly and openly! Most important aspect was that this was out in the open which could potentially damage the reputation of the business. So, businesses would be forced to respond to ensure that the complaint doesn’t get out of hand.
This indicates a definite shift of customer behavior. Now, whenever, I have a complaint or want to contact a business, the first thing to do is to check if they have a twitter handle. If they do, then tweet my question or complaint to them directly instead of going through their call center.
This indicates that businesses are now required to monitor both the social media channels (twitter, Facebook, etc) and also maintain their call centers (for their customers who still would like to talk to someone who don’t have a social profile yet and would hence like to talk to someone at the business.
Now, there is a choice for the business:
- Continue with the status quo and manage both the social and the call center channel
- Re-look at the contact strategy
While most of the businesses so far have been taking the 1st option, more and more businesses are now looking at the 2nd option.
Some options that businesses have if they decide to re-look at their customer contact strategy are:
Though these approaches have a lot of advantages if done well, they also have the potential for a PR disaster if not handled well. We have already seen many such social media provoked disasters (McDonald’s #McDStories, FedX story, etc).
So, it really is a difficult thing to manage. However, it is always such difficult things that when done well, set you apart from your competitors.
Do you think that businesses should adopt this strategy and do away with their call centers all together or do a slow transition?
Do let us your thoughts by sharing them as comments here..
PS: Some interesting point-of-views that I have come across on this topics are as below:
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