Social media a double-edged sword for industry

Communications Day, 06 May 2009, Petroc Wilson

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook allow consumers to immediately share feedback on particular companies – posing tremendous risk for firms which fail to adapt to the new paradigm, but opportunities for those which do. Nick Rodda, MD of hosted contact centre provider Global Speech Networks, outlined some of the steps companies could take to avoid poor feedback escalating quickly into catastrophic brand damage via social media platforms.

“On the risk mitigation side of things... companies have been quite reactive. They register a [social network] account, they see comments and they respond,” Rodda told CommsDay. “You need to be able to do that, but the other area in which we’re seeing strong emergence and use of technology is in being proactive: actually stopping [dissatisfied] people before they get going.”

One technology Global Speech Networks offers customers is automated, post-call surveys, where consumers coming off a call with a contact centre agent can immediately provide verbal feedback if unhappy with their experience. This allows for a follow-up call to mollify the customer immediately thereafter, hopefully pre-empting an angry tweet or Facebook post. “With this approach, you don’t catch everyone, but what we do see is up to 35% adoption,” said Rodda. “We think detractors are actually participating in a higher percentage of cases, which is exactly what you want.”

Rodda also recommended proactive, automated outbound calling to forestall negative feedback. “If you’ve got a delivery problem... and [your products] are going to be a week late, people are going to get annoyed and call the contact centre,” he said. “One of the tools we have is an outbound calling engine –  it’s an automated IVR that communicates to [customers] that their order will be slightly late, and you can add value by also telling them that because of the delay they will receive a gift voucher or similar type of thing.”

“So you turn what would have been a negative experience... into a situation where [customers] get on Twitter and say ‘they told me it was going to be late before it was going to be late and they gave me a half month free... you should sign up with these guys!’”

The spread of social networks, concluded Rodda, left businesses with little choice but to engage via these platforms. “But they do have to be intelligent about the way they do communicate,” he warned. “There’re heaps of opportunities right now for businesses to differentiate themselves in how they do embrace it.”