Monthly Archives: December 2010

Dec 14

social media and customer care

it is hard to see any advertisements these days that doesn’t carry facebook or twitter symbol in it, starting from microsoft to a tech blogs, almost every business unit have their own facebook page, where they get to “like” by their existing customers and future customers, similarly with twitter, they get to follow/followed by customers and future customers and they keep track of brand related topicc. what is really happening here?

 

Mahindra and Mahindra’s Chairman Anand Mahindra is very active in twitter, i am fortunate enough to follow his tweets from the early days he has started tweeting, he interacts with his customers regularly, he educates what his company is upto to the public as well as for his team, he such admiring twitter from india, and someone who uses this medium perfectly, for eg: there was one customer had problem with his new mahindra xylo, after fighting with all possible service centers he tweeted his frustration, Mr.Anand Mahindra retweeted it and asked his next level manager to take a look at it(i think they are following his tweets regularly as well), after sometime i saw a article in magazine similar to “new way of customer care is born” where this customer happen to be Brit journalist living in delhi and pretty impressed with speed of the service carried over after Mr.Anand Mahindra intervened. this is not the one, there are several other stories like this with Mahindra alone, and there are many companies and corporate leaders doing similar job.

 

so thats one medium where customer real voice/frustration is heard and taken care of, thats the tone with twitter, and facebook on other hand, it works like a forum where we can gather all customers and future customers together, you might have seen “like” pages for many brands if you are using facebook.

 

so how useful it is for brands? this one works differently from twitter, i am following ford figo in facebook, ford figo has presence in twitter as well as in facebook, but i pretty much like their facebook page better, they are regularly updating their facebook page with offers, tips, information about the car, which is certainly useful for the owners, and the offers you are always willing to share with your friends if you are already recommending the product, i happen to face some glitches in the car, i wrote about the problem to their page, guess what??? within 15 minutes 25+ comments… including from ford figo page itself, customers recommended direct phone numbers etc.. the problem is solved. now thats innovative customer care.

 

how these two things can reshape our customer care industry?

  • there should be a app for twitter that integrate with supervisor/agent screen pop, which will keep searching for the specific keywords that is relevant to our product. there will be some customer tweeting about the problem in the product, also praising our product, whenever a tweet is found that require support we can reply to customer and be some help, this way we reach customer when they have problem, than they try to reach us.
  • there should be a app for facebook that will connect with agent screenpop, where customers request for help, our agents can reply to them promptly. apart from agent replying, our existing customers do take care of them as well.
  • using facebook fbml we can design calendars, chats, pages and apps for our products.

 

Dec 10

outbound contact centers – answering machine detection

do you have answering machine enabled on your phone? especially cell phone? i do have, both at my cell phone as well as my home phone, not the kind of answering machine provided by service provider, but the application, that will answer the call after certain seconds of ringing then it will read out the message i have recorded and then starts recording the message you might leave for me. then i can listen to the message and decide who called and why they have called, depending on that i can decide to call again or ignore or other options, sounds very simple rite? no rocket science.

 

but many among us, don’t have the habit of leaving the message at the answering machine, they will simply hung up, this is major annoyance, especially if the call is from new number(number you never saved) and you dont know what they have called about, it is even more annoying you are expecting some important call. there are many other annoyance and benefits with answering machine, let us restrict our views with the answering machine encounter at the outbound contact centers – dialers.

 

with respect to dialers, we have two known behaviors when we get answering machine as the outcome.

  1. dialer drops the call when answer machine is detected
  2. without positive voice detection we still dial and patch with the agent.

 

first is very much counter productive in my opinion, why.

  • assume customer is very much interested to buy what you are selling, unfortunately he did not answer and answering machine answered the call, if you just hung up you never conveyed the message to the customer at all, and he never will call back, if you leave the proper message with the contact details and product information, there is very good chance customer will call back
  • another condition is your message will be saved in customers answering machine, he will be calling you back when he really need to buy your product.
  • customer at least want to know who has just called, that is the basic etiquette rite?

second is counter productive too, why?

 

  • first of all agent time is wasted on a customer who is not available right now
  • it is completely upto agent if he leaves the message or not

what we can do about it?

 

the auto detection of answering machine should still happen, instead of dropping the call, we should be able to record the message to the customers answering machine, with the pre-recorded message by the agent himself.

 

benefit?

  • agents time is saved
  • customer is notified
  • the money spent on the call is fully utilized

i am not sure if this feature is available in any of the dialers currently, if you know any please let me know.

Dec 5

how to focus at what we are good at and become indispensable?

Its the very old concept, business is all about demand and supply, in modern terms it is more of strength and weakness, Most of us fail in business or career, since we don’t understand this strength and weakness difference.

We humans don’t really appreciate what we already have(strength), but instead we focus on what we don’t have(weakness), this is were we loose ground. Day in day out soon we get exhausted in the fight to do something where we are not good at, but instead if we try to improve or excel at what we already have, we are going to feel good about it, best part is we can trade our expertise with someone who can work on our weakness.

Life has to be as simple as that, but instead we are playing around by ignoring our strength and focusing on weakness.

When it comes to business decide what we want to accomplish, what is our strength with respect to that, what are our weakness that need to be addressed, once we are clear about the destination and strength, we should start working towards destination, when necessity arrives to address weakness, we should hire professional who will buy our strength in return they fix our weakness.

At job search, we should list out our strengths honestly, many i know will list out their ambitions(i.e, they don’t really have that strength but want to acquire) those ambition purely your weakness or not really strength at this point, when employer talk to you about them, they can sense it easily where you got excited and where you didn’t, so focus on your strength, get really best at your strength, all good will follow you.