CEBP offers our enterprise clients a way to surf the wave of social crm

One of the major technology trends of the past few years has been the consumerization of technology adoption. Meaning, unlike in previous decades where the business market was the first one to adopt technology,  consumer applications or devices are now the leading edge of technology.  

This trend has resulted in consumers (all of us)  pushing to make our employers and business relationships adopt the technology that we use most regularly.  Social Media networks like Facebook and mobile sms tools like Twitter are great examples of consumer apps that are being pushed into the business community creating a social crm channel.  Opening up these new tech empowered social crm channels has become a real challenge for businesses of any size.

Creating and sustaining  a customer, vendor, friend, community communications strategy has real strategic and tactical complexities as well as opportunities. For large consumer driven enterprises, the massive scale attached to opening and managing multiple social crm channels can become mind boggling.  There are two very good recent reports by Gartner and Altimeter covering these social CRM trends.

With many billions of customer service contacts each year at an average per call cost (domestically or off shore) measured at $5.00  adding tens of billions of additional consumer interactions requires new thinking and tools.

Of course, these  new consumer channels need to flow through the businesses contact centers. Yet, this rapidly becomes a tsunami of  real time communications and social media traffic  that will test the capacity of any contact center.  More vitally, consumer expectations have changed. Proactive responses into the consumers’ preferred communication channel is the new standard. The traditional  metric of first call resolution within so many hours is dramatically out of step in a world of consumers posting their negative experiences to their networks of hundreds and thousands.  The old saying that a happy customer tells 5 people and an angry customer tells 25 people  about his experience needs to be exponentially updated.  

To add even more complexity, an old issue , identity verification, becomes even more important as we add millions if not billions of consumer contacts into these channels.

CEBP solutions like VoiceSage can become an integral part of these solutions.  Fortunately, VoiceSage’s ability to leverage  telco grade database queries offers a fast and simple method to provide identity verification for any consumer facing enterprise. These types of data feeds are no longer a function of hardware but of programming interfaces.

I’ve  previously touched on this theme of CEBP solutions as a glue technology. Social media and mobile technologies are the tools of choice for consumers.  Connecting, pulling, leveraging these consumer tools with traditional enterprise contact center technologies is not being done well now. CEBP solutions can be used to connect these two distinct worlds.

CEBP solutions allow our enterprise clients to buy themselves time to open these new social media/mobile communication channels without drowning their business.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA