There’s a lot that goes into building a successful contact center culture—from training and hiring practices to the software that you use. One of the newer developments in contact center best practices is the integration of social media. Social media isn’t anything new at this point, but using it in your contact center may be something you’ve shied away from up until now. That’s because it has to be a tailored approach that fits your business and what your customers are expecting out of your contact center.

One of the reasons that it’s so important to integrate social media into your contact center is that social media itself is a disruptive factor when it comes to resolution of customer problems. People no longer only have the option of calling your contact center and speaking with a representative to find the answer to their solution. If they’re put on hold, or they aren’t happy with the answer they get, they turn to the web.

And if you don’t have any type of presence online they can use to resolve their issue, then your customers will turn to social media in order to ask a vast group of online users what the answer is. This is obviously not something you want to happen. Your customers should be getting their information from you, not a random person or business online that thinks they know the answer. The point is, even if you aren’t on social media, your customers are.

When you begin integrating social media into your practices, you have to understand that there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, just like everything else. You don’t want to simply assign an agent the task of watching over the Facebook page in addition to their normal duties. And you also shouldn’t just create a Facebook and call it a day. The challenge is that tackling social media for a large company or organization requires actual integration of those social media platforms into the contact center.

This means coordinating all your different customer service channels and making sure that there are set rules for interactions that ultimately lead to good customer service. That means that the information that customers receive on the phone should be the same information that they receive on social media. Any inconsistencies look sloppy and create frustrations for your customers. When all your customer service channels are working in sync, you’ll find that issues are resolved quicker and with less trouble for both you and the customer.

Integrating social media into your contact center may seem like a daunting task, but with the right mindset and the right software, you’ll find that you have a new way to better serve your customers. So contact Kova today if you’re thinking about making the leap and integrating social media in your contact center. We’ve been helping contact centers just like yours increase their efficiency and provide better customer service.