TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

What Social Media Can Teach Contact Centers

Dave Greenfield | Date: 09-15-09 | Comments

The time is coming when social media will play a major role in call centers. When that happens, agents will need to learn whole new skill sets�and may even have to look good doing it.

According to my GPS, 211 Mt. Airy Road is a non-descript home set in bucolic Basking Ridge, N.J. So much for GPS. Actually, 211 is the braintrust for Avaya. I drove out there to meet with some very smart people on the research staff of Avaya Labs last week to review experimental technologies integrating social media and the contact center.

That contact centers and the Web are colliding are of little question. For years, we�ve heard about click-to-call buttons for initiating calls to contact centers from Websites provided by vendors, such as Interactive Intelligence, Skype, Broadsoft and IntelePeer. The technology is now mainstream enough, as any visitor to a Sears, Dell, Jenny Craig and Continental Airlines could tell you.

Increasingly, other real-time media and networks are being looked at for the contact center. Last August, Black Hawk County, Iowa, became the first emergency call center to accept requests for fire, police or ambulance by text messages. OnState offers a contact center that connects multiple real-time social networks, such as Skype, into the contact center.

Avaya�s approach was interesting, as it focused on the integration with Facebook. Four demonstrations were ready for me when I reached 211; only three were open for publication at this time. (Don�t you just hate that? But trust me. The fourth is well worth waiting for.)

The most prominent application, and the one that Avaya showed at great length in the ITEXPO show two weeks ago, was Facephone. This Facebook application lets consumers communicate with a contact center by initiating a phone, IM or video session directly from within Facebook.

The video calls rely on another experimental technology from Avaya Labs called Aura Thin Call. Thin Call uses SIP and Avaya�s Aura architecture to control Flash (or any third-party media). When the caller chooses to connect to an agent, they�re placed in a queue and receive a customized hold video much like the hold messages heard today before being connected to an agent.

Within the call center, Avaya demoed a third technology that turns the incoming call into a super screen pop, called Phone Mash. Screen pops have been notoriously costly to implement and typically restricted to the most important databases and applications. Phone Mash uses generalized Internet search technologies to populate the screen pop from different databases. Phone Mash was demoed with connectors for Outlook and Gmail, but could in theory pull information from any source of structured or unstructured data available to the company�s search engine.

Will the technologies make an impact on business? Certainly not in the short term. For one, they�re still lab projects, with Facephone closest to productization possibly next year. A year off is probably a good thing for a lot of enterprises. Avinash Gosai, a solutions manager for Suncore Energy, sees the whole prospect of social media as having potential relevance for the contact center, but only over the long term. �We�re trying to address immediate business requirements, but once that�s settled down we�ll be focusing on social media, such as Skype, IM and presence,� Gosai says.

Similarly, the time might give enterprises a chance to consider the true importance of chasing Facebook or any social media environment. �I�m reminded of the SecondLife demos that I saw at trade shows and analyst meetings 12 to 18 months ago," says Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, a contact center consultancy. �Looks sexy, but will enterprises really allocate scarce IT dollars to that kind of project?�

Enterprise will also have to consider the implications that changing media used for contacting the call center will have on agents and agent hiring. Aside from overloading existing agents with new types of �calls,� each new media requires a different skill. Chatting on IM requires different skills from interacting with a customer on the phone. Call centers need to understand those nuances and hire appropriately.

The same holds true for video calling for support. Adding click-to-video will force organizations to find agents who not only sound good on the phone, but look good in the process. One way to think of it, said an Avaya researcher during our meeting, is instead of hiring call center agents, they�re looking to hire a customer sales representatives�except the sales rep isn�t located on the floor but in a call center.

I think he�s on to something. Better still, maybe organizations should just hire a �booth babe.� On second thought, maybe not. Call volume would probably soar.