"I'm completely fascinated by social media," says Dr Nicola Millard. She's BT's resident futurologist, a psychologist by training, and she's watching the empowerment of consumers, of customers, with great interest.
The modern customer, she says, has become tremendously powerful, flexing the new-found ability to communicate faster and more effectively, and expecting companies to keep up. Many companies are struggling to adapt obsolete call-centre strategies to this new type of customer. As a result, they're coming under pressure, often because they're clinging to old-fashioned customer service metrics.
One business that typifies this newly empowered customer is Uber, the taxi service where drivers and passengers rate one another. If either side receives a consistently poor rating, they risk being summarily booted from the network, with drivers unable to accept new passengers, or passengers unable to get rides. That relationship, Millard says, is becoming more and more popular because of its enormous appeal. "There are an awful lot of models being built around mutuality. These models make it far more transparent than a traditional customer service model."
Some firms have taken that customer-centricity to a whole new level, she says. Giffgaff is a UK-based MVNO - a mobile virtual network operator operating a sub-brand of an established telecom operator - that crowd-sources its whole operation. "They don't have a marketing department or a call centre - they use referrals and get customers to solve each other's problems. Being an MVNO means they can experiment with a differently branded part of the organisation, and establish a very different relationship with their customers."
Go social or go home
Underpinning much of this evolution is social media, a great leveller offering consumers an amplified voice to express concerns or share plaudits, and doing so out of the control of companies and suppliers. "Giffgaff is completely enabled by social media. They have a forum rather than a call centre."
Customer forums are nothing new, and were a primitive form of social media before the term existed, but they showed the direction communities could go from the very start, Millard says. "At BT, we established a forum with some intelligent technology to monitor what was on the forum and index it automatically. We found that a customer would come in with a problem, and frequently the community could come back with a solution faster than we could, and sometimes much more inventive solutions than we would have too." That became grist for the mill, with BT adapting customer service, and even product development, based on what its top-performing forum members were contributing. And top-performing contributors were rewarded with early access to products - which, in turn, provided additional testing feedback.
And yet many companies really struggle to embrace social media. At the heart of that struggle is a desire to micromanage, or to own the exchange, Millard says. "A lot of organisations have a standard, automated response to any social media interaction, 'We're sorry you have a problem, please e-mail us'. I can see why they're doing it. No one wants their dirty linen aired in public, but one of the virtues of social media is that you can be very clever and very personal. There's no way you can do that with a robot." There's also no way you can do it with a low-skilled call-centre agent, the type Dilbert creator Scott Adams describes as a 'moist robot'.
In fact, Millard is in the middle of conducting research into social media patterns in businesses. She says one of the early surprises was a clear link between personalisation and positivity. In other words, the more interactive you are with customers, the more likely they are to spread a positive message. "I'm often stunned about the amount of positivity there is. The brands that seem to be more engaged on social media are the ones that get more positivity."
But social media is not for everyone. Millard likens it to a dance floor: "You can't control the dance, but you can choose when, and whether, to get up and dance. The worst thing you can do is completely embarrass yourself. Not everyone should be on the dance floor, but, at a minimum, you should be watching."
A major part of the problem is that customer service centres are stuck in the Stone Age, Millard says, and are not entrusted with social media. They are out of the social media loop, kept in isolation, without the skills or authority to tackle callers' problems. As a result, many customers turn to social media, since the marketing teams often have more authority to solve problems, but this is a dangerous cycle, Millard notes, and one that can be broken with a little effort. Step one is to stop viewing the call centre as a cost centre to be minimised.
"When we get angry, interesting things happen. We become illogical, our short-term memory halves, we have no ability to concentrate. So, actually, the phone channel is a good place for a customer who's lost his temper. Often the contact centre is getting the really emotive stuff - angry customers with complicated problems. So why employ the lowest-paid, least experienced phone operator to deal with them? We need a different profile of person here."
Contact centres are under pressure to become 'omni-channels', embracing the many ways customers might get in touch. But, Millard asks, are customers omni-channel by choice? "Or is it that we turn to social media out of frustration when we're stuck on hold? Push the web-chat button and have a little race to see which one gets answered first? In that case, social media frustration is happening not out of preference but because of the failure of the primary channel."
Contact centre managers need to take the initiative or risk being automated out of existence, Millard warns, and that will only make the social network more difficult to manage as frustrations spill over. "They need to position themselves not as a cost, but as a custodian of customer experience, and a source of business intelligence. They're getting lots of information in real-time about what customers think about products and services. The metrics they use - call volume - are getting wrecked because call durations are going up as problems get more complex. Call handling metrics are irrelevant in a multichannel universe."
Companies that manage that evolution stand to improve their relationships with these newly empowered customers. "I spoke to a South African customer that empowers their call centre to chase down the causes of problems. Lots of calls about the Web site? Chase the Web site guys and demand to know if it's down and when it'll be back up, so you can update your IVR and call scripts. Then push a suitable message out on social media so customers know you're on top of the problem."
One thing is certain: the ways that companies are interacting with their customers is changing, profoundly and quickly. And that change is being driven by the customer. Companies need to learn to relinquish control and watch for opportunities as patterns emerge, rather than clinging to obsolete proscriptive customer service practices.
First published in the November 2014 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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