... its been too long since I added something to this blog. What is my excuse? There were a lot of things on my mind, keeping me preoccupied. But before I forget, finally, after multiple calls to Vodacom's customer care, three attempts to illicit a response via twitter, I reverted to "HelloPeter.com"... and Voila - they called me back and answered my questions. Why did it take so long, and why does it have to be such a horrendeous customer experience? Makes me wonder.... why are the agents who answer the customer's calls not trained to answer these questions (as it turned out there was a simple explanation to this all). ? Makes me wonder....
Back to the notes I do want to record - in August I sent an email to a representative of for Genesys in South Africa (ICT/Customer Service Technology). Based on what I experience at work, and based on what I read online, I asked him whether they ever considered introducing the tools functionality (for Social Media engagement) also to the Marketing teams of companies - in particular in those companies which already have an investment in Genesys? And as "the conversation is changing" so should the audience for the solution. The latest G-force conference would have been perfect - markting teams could attend and understand what it is all about.... what the solution can offer - and how SM is not only of value to Marketing, but perfect channel for customer service.
While investigating all of this, I also discovered that companies (Vodacom as an example) have more than one Social Media identity... if you want customer service, then sent a tweet to @Vodacom111 (owned by Customer Care) and if you just want to contact Vodacom, then its @Vodacom (owned by marketing). ... At the moment, Vodacom's Customer Service team monitors @Vodacom111 and not really the @Vodacom account. But would every customer out there know which account to use? If I have a complaint, it is very likely that I send the complaint to the main brand /company name. And it should also simply be one contact ... But if this account is not monitored, customer complaints and issue will go unnoticed, potentially harming the brand image. A powerful tool such as Genesys can support a "one account contact"... and route based on configured business rules... a very powerful functionality.. but do they know and realise the power of this? The engineer and techies in the ICT division probably do know this...but I doubt marketing or decision making executives have a clue of what's possible.... and the engineers are not the right people to market this... engineers were never sales people ;-)
Today I stumbled on Tom Eggermeier's Blog ( Head of Global Enterprise Sales & Field Operations at Alcatel/Lucent) He promised that as of next week he write about "what the future of Customer Service can become when we think about how to engage the 750 million customers using Social Media with great Customer Service." - am looking forward to reading this...
Ok... I will probably edit this blog post a bit in the next few days...until then - treat it as a draft...
No comments:
Post a Comment