Companies Leaving the Social Media and Mobile App Puzzle Piece Out of the Customer Experience

Call centers aren’t strangers to measuring metrics. In fact, the call center is probably the most measured business component of any organization: statistics like average handle time, schedule adherence, first-call resolution, hold times, queue length, call volume and many others are measured to the nth degree so call center managers can seek ways to improve both operations and the customer experience.

As the number of media used by customers to contact call centers has increased, the metrics burden has become even greater. For many call centers, social media has been the straw to break the camel’s back. Most call centers simply aren’t equipped with enough time, technology or knowledge to measure social media metrics. Add to social media mobile channels, and most companies are simply overwhelmed.

This is unfortunate, because social media and new mobile channels are becoming the media of choice for customers to interact with companies.

“The huge growth in social, mobile and self-service channels has left many customer service organizations without a means to measure and monitor performance on these growing channels,” wrote Constellation Research’s Elizabeth Herrell (News - Alert) in a recent blog post. 

Statistics back this up. Dimension Data’s (News - Alert) “Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2012” found that less than 10 percent of companies surveyed measured costs and time for social media channels such as Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter. Just over six percent of those surveyed are measuring their performance for smartphone mobile application support. 

This is unfortunate, because it means many contact centers are leaving a significant portion of their customers hanging in the wind.

Why are companies having such a hard time tracking and measuring the customer experience in social media and mobile applications? In many cases, it’s because these channels have been disconnected from more traditional channels, such as telephone and media. Companies, at a loss for understanding who to put in charge for social media and mobile, have in many cases given the task to marketing, which means there is a chasm between traditional and new customer service channels.

Smart companies discovered quickly that social media and mobile application monitoring belong in the call center, where they can be combined with other channels to provide a 360-degree view of the customer. Many of today’s cutting-edge call center platforms – such as Interactive Intelligence’s (News - Alert) Customer Interaction Center (CIC) platform – include features, modules and integrated solutions -- for measuring and managing both social media and mobile application channels.

This way, companies can keep a holistic view of the customer regardless of how that customer chooses to contact a company. By skipping this vital integration of customer media, companies are literally losing a big chunk of the customer relationship puzzle to chance, and few companies today can afford to make that mistake.

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