Social media’s business uses grow

The way in which people communicate is rapidly changing, with multichannel communication becoming commonplace in contact centres. And social media is finding other uses than as the marketing department’s window onto the thinking of actual and potential customers.

As organisations expand their business use of new communication channels social media is finding a new role as a customer service tool that can improve the customer experience.

This is now the route being followed by Intelecom Group AS, a provider of cloud contact management technology, which has added enhanced social media handling capabilities to its flexible, multichannel cloud contact centre solution, Connect.

This already has an integration capability with Facebook, which involves contact centre agents logging onto the Facebook network to use it. Now, the latest version of the product, social media enquiries from both Facebook and Twitter are integrated fully with traditional communication channels. This means that agents can deal with them all directly, from within the same application.

Because it is cloud-delivered, Connect can work in any location, independent of hardware, software, platform or device. It has been designed for integration with third party applications, and its contact-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) framework ensures customers achieve operational and cost efficiency on a pay-per-use basis which requires no capital investment or maintenance costs.

Christian Thorsrud, Product Manager at Intelecom Group AS said, “Analysts predict that by 2016 as many as 50% of enterprises will utilise social media as a customer channel. Social media will be the new servicing norm in just few years. This new version of Connect deals with social media networks in the same way as traditional channels like telephone, email, SMS and Chat enabling improved operational efficiency and social customer service.”