We are currently living in the age of social media, it has grown from just keeping up with friends on one network to having profiles on multiple networks. You’re not just keeping up with your family and friends anymore, you’re keeping up to date with news, celebrities and being targeted left right and centre by businesses with their marketing and advertising among other things. Social media holds great weight when it comes to influence and is a very public channel of communication, this is somewhere where you don’t want to be trash talked by anyone.

With 74% of internet users having active social media accounts it is time to pay close attention to social channels if you haven’t already, use of social media is only forecasted to increase as rapidly as it has been over the past few years. This means integrating social into the contact centre.

There are so many social networks out there so how do you know which channels to integrate and monitor? It’s time to look at your analytics. You need to discover which channels are most popular and most used by your customers, but also keep in mind how popular they are overall. You might have a lot of customers that use LinkedIn but as a smaller social network you might not want to put all of your focus on it. Platforms with the most active users include; Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter. Consider which are the biggest social networks with the most influence but are also the most popular with your customers.

You need to go further than just integrating your social channels into your contact centre, agents need to be well versed in using the social channels as customer service platforms. Whether you take on new agents and build a social team or train all existing agents to be multi-skilled and able to manage the multiple channels.

With a multi-channel contact centre solution you are able to streamline all of your media channels (voice, email, SMS, web chat and social media) into a single, fully-integrated solution where they are displayed on an agent’s desktop. A multi-channel solution is very easy to use and is cost effective, you can queue, route and monitor enquiries all in one place and even integrate a CRM. Such solution empowers your agents to deliver next level customer service at all times, it allows you to provide customers with all of the information they need quickly and to respond to all issues in a timely manner.

For more information about our multi-channel contact centre solutions get in touch with our team on 01223 427700 or email info@c3.co.uk.