The world of customer management is about to undergo some disruptive change, driven by assumptions by customers that the technology they want to use is automatically in use within business entities.
One can hardly blame the person in the street for assuming that all the cool stuff they can buy at retail shops, and all the social media, will enable them to open a bank account, order a new credit card, buy a new car - or interact in any other commercial way with any organisation that claims to have an online presence.
South Africans shop on the Internet far less than their peers in other parts of the world.
Evan Jones is business development manager at Merchants.
The problem, however, is that organisations don't understand just how pressingly and irreversibly social media are changing customer expectations of interaction with them. Dimension Data's 2011 Benchmarking Report shows that only one-fifth of the 546 organisations surveyed worldwide are providing Web chat and SMS services.
Notably, in SA, no more than 10% of contact centres are providing these services. Part of the reason for this is that bandwidth has been not only limited, but expensive. Also, online commerce as a consumer culture is not particularly well-developed here. South Africans shop on the Internet far less than their peers in other parts of the world. So, online interaction with organisations is less prevalent and contact centres have not felt as much pressure to offer SMS and Web chat facilities.
The most obvious business implication of the changes being driven by social media is that contact centres will need to upgrade their technologies to accommodate IP-based customer contact - and to make their operations more adaptable, generally.
At a more conceptual level, organisations will need to shift from having contact centres to having customer management centres - that provide access to the organisation via multiple channels - combined with customer relationship management (CRM) systems that are transactional rather than simply storehouses of information about customers. Clearly, this has technological implications as well. But, mind shifts can be more challenging.
Getting there from here
It's been a while now since telephony and fax took second place to e-mail in contact centres. So, it really should be no surprise that the Benchmarking Report shows that social media are increasingly being chosen by customers as a way of interacting with organisations.
But wherever on the technology adoption curve contact centres are, the challenges posed by the social media remain the same.
For instance, those organisations that are providing SMS and Web chat facilities are doing so at an extremely low level of complexity. That's partly because customers are currently using social media for very simple queries, such as the restoration of a password or finding out what their bank balance is.
Mostly, however, the complexity of interaction is being limited by the fact that the CRM systems in which companies have often invested considerable sums of money is not geared to be transactional, and certainly, was built in the days before channels such as Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and Web chat existed.
An enormous investment is required to make those legacy systems robust and flexible enough to handle multiple channels as well as integrate with transactional systems so as to enable secure commercial activity between the customer and the organisation.
Social media policy
When the organisation makes that sort of investment does depend, of course, on its customer management strategy. In the long-term, however, as competitors do make multi-channel facilities available to customers and as customers mature in their use of social media, one is going to be left with no alternative but to adjust. Hopefully, the adjustment won't come too late!
The way in which an organisation adjusts from a simple contact centre focus to a holistic, multi-channel customer management one, and from conventional to transactional CRM, will need to be governed by extremely clear policies.
A basic choice is whether to have a grassroots approach to social media and open the organisation to a high order of risk by being accessible through the very public medium of, say, Facebook - or to limit social media facilities to employees and business partners.
Whatever the choice is, it needs to be made soon, because the new contact channels that are evolving are maturing faster than the organisations they will be used to contact.
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