Call Center Solutions Featured Article

Social media has been intertwined into our daily lives, creating new platforms of communication that have been embraced by industries we never thought possible, such as the medical field, television manufacturers and the marketing world. Recently, around the world, social media has also become a marker for customer experiences, and if analyzed correctly, could help organizations gain data and statistics to improve their overall business continuity.

Laura Bassett, director of marketing for Avaya's (News - Alert) Customer Experience Management and Emerging Technologies unit, has decided to meet her customers at the one place they depend on most – the palms of their hands – and more specifically, their mobile devices. It is here where most consumers vent their complaints or compliments about a business, rather than turning to its customer support centers.

Avaya, a provider for business communication solutions, has enveloped this discovery into its Customer Experience Management solutions for contact centers by adding new tools for speech analytics and tracking customer satisfaction through social media outlets and mobile devices. It has created four different solutions to aide this social media effort; one being the new update version of Avaya Aura Call Center Elite Multichannel that now has capabilities to track customer interactions through Web chats, social media forums and SMS.  There will also be a new Automated Chat solution that will let customers ask questions directly on its website rather than having to call a customer service agent.

With IBM’s (News - Alert) “Birth of a Trend” project is a new way to predict online trends, which can change the playing field for industries all over the world. This new research method studies online trends globally on social networks to help predict what trends are going to be commercially successful and profitable, proving just how important it is for businesses to have a social media presence and communication outlet for consumers. Avaya, like IBM, has already incorporated these tools into its solutions, and as a result, is a few steps ahead of its competitors.

As call centers begin to take note of the depth of intelligence that can come from properly using social media outlets to their advantage, they can begin answering problems of customers before they even have a chance to ask an organization directly. So while social media was initially created for entertainment purposes, we are beginning to see organizations alike utilizing its powerful voice to their own advantage.