Your customers are talking about your company: discussing the good, bad and the ugly, with comments that are sometimes accurate, on occasion not, but regardless that is their must-listened-to voice on an ever-expanding universe of social media channels. Yet because this channel is so new yet rapidly growing you want to minimize your capital outlays while ensuring that what you buy is seamlessly integrated with your solutions that support the others i.e. voice, e-mail and chat.
To help you hear your customers on the social channel, capturing what they are saying for analysis and action, as well as their words on the others, business process outsourcer (BPO) Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (ACS), a Xerox Company now offers Community as a Strategy. This is a suite of social CRM services that captures customer insights from social media sites to improve the service and responsiveness of any organization.
Community as a Strategy, says ACS, leverages analytics to scour the Internet to find references about an organization and then aggregates those conversations from blogs and other social networks into a centralized database and reporting dashboard for review and possible action by contact center agents. Organizations can then develop a social media strategy for contact centers that will help cut costs and increase revenues through reduced call and e-mail volumes, increased first contact resolution, extended customer relationships and improved lead conversion rates.
ACS is adding social CRM along with other social media service offerings as an option within the aggregated hosted contact center solution.
ACS is one of the first global outsourcers, it says, to incorporate all aspects of the contact center customer lifecycle - sales, service and analytics - into a social CRM solution. Community as a Strategy combines social media marketing, consulting, agent-assisted and automated social media monitoring, CRM reporting, and data integration technologies. This enables companies to proactively connect with customers before they contact them. Community as a Strategy is hosted, which minimizes capital and IT costs and provides flexibility and scalability.
"It's not enough for businesses to just listen or participate in the conversations taking place on social media sites," said Michael Wooden, senior vice president of market development, ACS Business Process Solutions. "ACS is using proven technology in an innovative way, enabling organizations to capture and distill those 'conversations' into knowledge that can be used to improve customer service, using social media monitoring and management tools."
The Community as a Strategy CRM offering is the ACS' first major upgrade of its solutions since its acquisition by Xerox in February 2010. ACS, says Xerox, is the world's largest diversified BPO firm. Its expertise is in automating work processes and in providing BPO and IT outsourcing services. With more than 33,000 agents in 150 customer care centers globally ACS employees handle in excess of one million customer interactions every day in 20 different languages.
"For the past 50 years, Xerox has fortified its leadership in document management, creating new markets through our renowned innovation," said Ursula M. Burns, Xerox chief executive officer. "With ACS, we take another step forward, expanding our leadership to include business process outsourcing that helps simplify document-driven work. The new Xerox provides the technology and services to help our customers reach new levels of efficiency and effectiveness, giving them the freedom to focus on what matters most: their real business."