LiveOps Blog
UK = The Hub of Social Enterprise
It is clear from Cloudforce London and the many LiveOps customers and partners that we met with that ‘Social CRM’, or social customer service is on the move in the UK. This was showcased in several case studies at the Cloudforce event.
Marty Beard, President and CEO
Many of our customers in the UK are trailblazers in this area and have smartly leveraged our social-enabled cloud contact center software to deliver high quality customer service, and in the process, distinguished themselves from their peers. They are mixing ‘traditional channels’, like voice and email, with social channels like Twitter and Facebook, to provide a better 2-way and real-time interaction with their customers.
LiveOps customers Royal Mail, ParcelForce and Wokingham Borough Council have embraced this shifting communication culture through LiveOps Platform.
With LiveOps, Wokingham Council’s contact center now can service the borough’s 160,000 citizens through their preferred communication channels be it email, chat, voice, SMS or Twitter. By acknowledging social government through LiveOps, the council is ahead of the curve and has been able to deploy new services such as the traffic issue reporting service and the “Dog and Bone Text Alert Scheme”. Through the scheme, the council’s contact center can alert dog walkers via SMS when a dog has been reported as missing within the borough.
Through LiveOps Social, Royal Mail has improved public perception of the organization by delivering a deeper level of customer engagement. By responding to customer concerns on public forums such as Twitter in real-time, the postal service has accelerated “first tweet problem resolution”. Ultimately Royal Mail has demonstrated a true commitment to their customers by harnessing cloud-based customer services.
As the show concluded and the sun set over London’s Excel, it became clear that the social enterprise will continue to gain momentum in the UK and beyond. Hats of the trailblazers as they set the scene for the future in customer services!
- Marty Beard, President & CEO
Cloudforce London, 2012
Ann Sung Ruckstuhl
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Cloudforce London kicked off today with a bang! Congratulations to George Hu and the Salesforce.com team for putting together yet another excellent event. George’s keynote on social enterprise and the rapidly evolving social customer service environment reflects LiveOps’ vision to a tee. As social customer interactions reach critical mass, NOW is the time for contact centers to embrace multichannel customer service with social at its core.
LiveOps is an established leader in social customer service and we firmly believe that social enterprise is the future. Today’s customers expect to engage in two-way communications with brands on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Pragmatically speaking, however, we must not lose sight of existing communications channels such as web chat, voice, email or SMS which many customers simply prefer. It would be counterproductive to just focus on one or two channels.
At Cloudforce we’re demonstrating LiveOps Social and LiveOps Voice contact center solutions. Both demos are attracting a lot of visitors. The fact that they are interested in both social and voice is a testament to the importance of multichannel customer services.
- Ann Ruckstuhl, SVP & CMO
Announcing LiveOps Social with New Facebook Channel Integration
Sanjay Mathur, Senior Vice President of Product Management, LiveOps
Today, we are excited to announce the integration of Facebook into LiveOps Social on the LiveOps Platform. The way that brands interact with their customers has changed. We’re entering into a “New Era of CRM” – and we know that if you want CRM to be truly social, the contact center needs to be social, as well.
LiveOps Social, a cloud application, leverages the LiveOps Platform to manage social customer interactions and deliver a better customer experience by providing a more complete and holistic view of interactions across all channels. The application was specially designed to enable companies to go beyond just social media monitoring.
LiveOps Social for Facebook furthers our offering of a quick, easy, and efficient way for enterprises to bridge their contact center to their social and mobile customers, enabling them to engage in two-way interactions on customers’ preferred channels.
Why LiveOps Social?
- Monitor designated Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages, as well as by hashtag or keyword, in real-time
- Tweet or post comments easily in response to customer needs
- Pivot seamlessly from Twitter or Facebook to more private channels, such as voice or email, when required and then back again if needed
- Access reply templates for standardized responses
- Rest assured messages are intelligently routed to the best available agent through comprehensive queue management and engagement tools
- Allow agent access to a single, concise record of the customer’s complete interaction history
- Monitor and trackindividual agent performance; View report of all customer-agent interactions across all channels in a single system
LiveOps Social with new Facebook integration is available immediately worldwide. Want more information?
UK Borough Engages with Residents in the Cloud
Sarah Barrow, Head of Customer Services & Administration, Wokingham Borough Council
As head of customer services & administration at Wokingham Borough Council in the UK, I’m responsible for ensuring the 160,000 residents, as well as businesses, of Wokingham Borough are well-connected to the Council. This is not just done via phone or in-person meetings anymore. Communication has modernised with the shifting culture, so we’re finding more of our customers now prefer to use email, mobile devices and social media. So we’ve been mirroring their preferred forms of communication with the cloud-based LiveOps Platform, which I recently spoke about at the IQPC Call Centre Europe conference in London.
Communicating with such a diverse customer base is always a challenge. Modern communication methods dictate much faster response times and with resource pressures from Government, we had to find a solution that improved the organisation and efficiency of our responses. LiveOps gave us the ability to manage all types of customer contact in a holistic way. The LiveOps Platform enables the Council to monitor and respond to residents’ comments and questions in real time via email, SMS, web chat, and social media. Utilising cloud technology in our contact centre facilitates and encourages home and flexible working, saving 50 percent in office space, increasing productivity and decreasing sickness and absenteeism. The way in which we have engaged with our residents using Twitter during a recent major change to their council services has had a very positive impact on public perception.
By working with LiveOps, Wokingham Borough Council has reduced costs and administration, shrunk its environmental foot print, increased the quality of communication with our residents and has been recognized nationally for outstanding customer service communications. By enabling real time interactions with our residents, we are making people’s daily lives better — a powerful and wonderful outcome of moving to the cloud.
Sarah Barrow
Head of Customer Services & Administration
Wokingham Borough Council
LiveOps at 2012 Call Centre & Customer Services Summit
Ann Sung Ruckstuhl
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Last week LiveOps met with dozens of industry leaders at the Call Centre & Customer Services Summit in Northamptonshire, UK. Top managers in customer services, contact centres and business operations took time out to quiz vendors on how they could add business value.
The hotels and leisure, financial services, retail, gambling and consumer goods manufacturing sectors were well represented, as were local government and housing associations.
“Compared to September 2011, the mood of the summit was significantly more upbeat,” reported LiveOps’ European Sales Director, Mark Edgeworth. “Attendees were putting a lot of emphasis on wanting to build long term relationships with service providers they liked, tackling strategic issues in partnership with them, rather than just plugging a functional gap at the lowest price. It seems companies are ready to invest in customer service again, to help them compete.”
Key drivers for investment included the need to replace legacy systems, contracts falling due for renewal and managers wanting to replace software that was no longer supported. Both Avaya and Mitel are causing considerable frustration for customers facing hefty bills to upgrade to a supported version of their software. “People are feeling really trapped and quite hopeless. It should be of concern to the whole industry that some installed software providers are so severely limiting clients’ ability to deliver best practice service,” says Mark.
Attendees were frequently feeling stuck on an old voice system that didn’t give them the flexibility they needed to run a modern contact centre. Or wanted to consolidate a multiple of different systems giving different communication channels, such as email, SMS or web chat, into one system they could easily integrate with their CRM. Sometimes both.
“This year the summit was all about overhaul, improve and replace,” says Mark.
Attendees understand they can now use technology to improve customer service and automate tasks, while retaining or improving service quality. They want technology that will enable them to simplify the contact centre, whilst opening up new channels and working practices and at the same time lifting service response times and quality.
Managers want to keep the same number of agents in their contact centres, but use technology to enable their current teams to handle increased messages or call volumes, without losing quality.
We were particularly impressed with the passion from Velux Windows, Mothercare and Kenwood for making smart use of technology to improve service delivery for their customers.
There was a real buzz at the Summit about the potential for cloud delivery and it was great to be able to step lots of the attendees through what it could mean for them and their businesses. Especially for those looking for a staged escape from legacy systems or installed software.
We created a bit of a buzz ourselves too, attending as LiveOps for the first time, rather than Datasquirt who had become regulars at the event. It was exciting to be able to showcase the fully integrated range of voice, social and mobile capability, and talk about how much LiveOps clients enjoy the freedom of ongoing upgrades and pay-as-you-go flexibility, with the comfort of great aftercare.
Thanks to Forum Events for hosting a format that works for clients and vendors. The team can’t wait for September’s Summit in London!
Ann Ruckstuhl
SVP & CMO