Electronic Retailer - November 2011 - 30

CALL CENTERS IN THE AGE OF FACEBOOK

forms of customer contact. That includes online chat and email correspondence generated by company websites, as well as the responsibility for monitoring social media sites and responding to comments about the company or its products. What struck Jackson so forcefully about her interaction with Bed Bath & Beyond was that she got to experience, as a customer, the three major forces that she says are transforming the call center business. The first is consumerization. She says that consumers now “are in the driver’s seat” with regard to how and when they will contact a company. They can do it by phone, mobile device, text, email, via the company’s website, or through a social-media avenue such as Facebook or Twitter. She calls the second force “cloud,” borrowing a term LiveOps uses to describe its virtual contact center, which uses agents who work out of their homes. She means that physical locations are becoming irrelevant, or at least fluid, as customers expect ever-greater levels of convenience. Why carry towels and bedding out of a Bed Bath & Beyond store in California and drive or ship them to a college in Colorado if your purchases could be waiting at a Colorado store for you to arrive? Every time a retailer does something like this, it quickly evolves from a “wow” to a new baseline consumer expectation. The third force is talent. Traditional call centers needed agents who were good on the phone. Contact centers need people who can work the phones, but they also need agents who can monitor social media sites and interact with customers in writing – sometimes in public online forums.

Industry executives say that “call center” is increasingly a misnomer. “Contact center” is becoming far more descriptive of their business. Retailers and other companies are farming out not only phone calls for sales and service but all forms of customer contact.
page, Rojas says, “Our agents have to understand that they’re not having a private chat. Whatever they write will be public, exposed and heavily monitored by the client and the client’s customers. … It’s up there for the world to see, misspellings and all.” Writing skills obviously are necessary, Rojas says, but not as crucial as you might think, since Vixicom’s Facebook agents are supported by software that lets them post ready-made responses to a host of frequently asked questions and common comments. “It’s more a matter of knowing what to post and what not to,” he says. “You need a person who doesn’t take things personally and who will use a lot of diplomacy when dealing with aggravated customers. It’s a completely different scenario from handling a phone call.” That is a major reason why most companies still use internal marketing people to interact with customers on social media sites, Rojas says. Few are comfortable yet with the idea of farming out that piece of the customer-contact puzzle to a call center. He finds directresponse marketers especially reluctant. “No DR clients are using us to handle their Facebook pages,” he says. “But that will come – and soon.” Companies are awakening quickly to the implications of social media, by means of which customers can tell multitudes of people exactly what they think about a product or service, for good or ill. Giant call center operation West Direct, with headquarters in Omaha, Neb., now has agents whose main job is to monitor blogs and other social media sites for clients that range from global financial and communications companies to direct response marketers. “Social media is truly a new kind of forum,” says West Direct president Rod Kempkes. “And there’s no controlling the forum. You can combat it, or you can jump in and add assistance, or you can ignore it. Companies that ignore it find themselves in blogospheres that are not friendly.” Suppose, Kempkes says, that a client DR company sells a blender and that people posting to some consumer blogs are complaining that it jams. If West’s monitoring agent discovers that, then West can work with the marketer to devise an effective response that can be reposted again and again. For instance, Kempkes says, “The company might want us to post: ‘Sometimes the blender jams with ice. If you’re having trouble, try the reset button.’” Such simple measures can defuse reputation-killing online chatter and rescue a great many sales. But taking those measures requires a new kind of call center agent and a new channel of communication between the call center – better make that the contact center – and its client.

Changing Times
The rate at which companies are farming out new forms of customer contact to call centers is accelerating. “The majority of our agents still answer the phones, but within the past year alone our volume of email and social media contacts has exploded,” says Fred Shadding, senior vice president of business development for Cyber City Teleservices of Hackensack, N.J., which operates call centers in Panama and the Philippines.

Skill Shift
Facebook, in particular, requires agents with a different skill set, says Ramon Rojas, co-owner and chief operating officer of Vixicom, a call center based in the Dominican Republic. When a client company entrusts Vixicom to respond to customer comments or questions on its Facebook 30

electronicRETAILER | November 2011

Electronic Retailer - November 2011

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