Last week, Forbes.com had an interesting piece on the social enterprise titled “When it Comes to Social Media, How Big Are Your Company’s Ears?” In the article, Dave Gardner points out that the social enterprise is not exclusively outbound communications. Rather, it’s really about employee collaboration through social media to listen, connect engage with customers and analyze the data for improvement.
Customers no longer solely rely on the old 800 number standby to voice frustration with a company. Socially advanced organizations know that customers view a tweet the same way they view an inbound call and expect nearly the same level of response.
Gardner cites the example of Dell who, back in 2007, created IdeaStorm as a way to listen to the ideas given by both their customers and non-customers. The concept resulted in over 400 externally generated ideas being implemented into packaging, product development and more. The initiative has inspired Dell to aim for a social enterprise that will connect social media, their customer database and CRM and create quality sales leads out of the information.
However, programs like Dell’s are not produced overnight by the social media fairy.
One of the keys to building a successful social enterprise is the infrastructure behind it. A customer contact solution that combines workforce optimization (WFO) with advanced enterprise technologies can help enable organizations to build a robust and intelligent social enterprise. WFO encompasses technologies and business practices that focus enterprise resources and efforts on customer contact. Organizations rely on WFO to plan, execute, measure and continuously improve customer engagement regardless of where or how customer interactions are initiated.
This capability increases visibility into customer interactions and connects departments across the enterprise and into the partner ecosystem and out into the socialsphere. For example, speech and desktop analytics, social monitoring, and other recording tools capture, evaluate and report customer feedback and workforce performance data in real time which in turn can help identify sales opportunities previously lost.
You can read more in the Aspect white paper, 5 Ways to Optimize Your Workforce for Customer Contact in a Social Marketplace to dive deeper into the subject.
You know your customers are talking. Where are you listening to them?