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
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
Is Your Contact Center Keeping Up with the Shifting Social Media Landscape?
Eric Salas, Director, Product Marketing
Earlier today, Facebook announced their $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, and last week Pinterest skyrocketed to become the third-largest social network behind Facebook and Twitter. When you consider how quickly the social media landscape can shift, you also have to wonder how companies can keep up with all the new and different ways customers want to interact with their brands–not to mention the sheer volume of interactions that could potentially be generated by them. Are customers going to be “pinning” a photo to initiate a service request any time soon? Perhaps they already are in some cases. But no matter what the latest trend might be, it’s clear that companies have to be better prepared to engage with customers wherever they choose to be.
One of the reasons to choose a cloud-based, multichannel technology platform in your contact center is to ensure that you are better prepared for the ever-shifting social landscape. At LiveOps, we’re seeing more companies utilize our cloud contact center platform to enable their contact centers to engage more effectively with customers in social media, and work more closely with their marketing teams to deliver a better customer experience in social channels. And, by leveraging a social-enabled cloud platform, enterprises can deliver customer service more quickly in new channels. Look for another post in a few weeks from Keith McFarlane, Chief Architect, that will go into more detail about how LiveOps cloud contact center technology can help you meet the challenges of the new social media landscape.
In the meantime, here are a few more “must-reads” from the past week on social customer service:
Pinterest Is Now the Third Most Popular Social Network in the U.S. …
socialtimes.com4/6/12
Marketing wants to own ‘Social Engagement?’ Think again.
blogs.gartner.com4/9/12
20 Tips on How to Deliver an Amazing Customer Service Experience
thesocialcustomer.com4/4/12
Not All Fun and Games: One Call Center’s … – Social Media Today
socialmediatoday.com4/4/12
Clearing Up the Customer Service/Customer Experience Confusion …
www.1to1media.com4/6/12
Some Thought-Starters on Social Customer Service
Eric Salas, Director, Product Marketing
Just last Thursday, we were at the Cloudforce event in San Francisco listening to Marc Benioff ask an audience of 17,000 people, “how does your enterprise bridge the social divide?” Well, the week has definitely flown by very quickly, but here at LiveOps we continue to have conversations around this topic. We are passionate about learning more and sharing ideas to help companies become social enterprises. More specifically, how can we help guide companies as they look for ways to bridge their contact center to their customers via social and mobile channels?
Below are some recent articles and blog posts I came across this past week that you might find useful on the topic of social customer service. I’ll be back soon to share some more!
Eric Salas
Director, Product Marketing
10 reasons why customer service has failed to wake up to social …
econsultancy.com3/14/12
Stop Making Mistakes with “Social Media Mistakes” by Brian Cantor
www.customermanagementiq.com3/12/12
The State of Social Customer Service [Infographic] | Our Social Times
oursocialtimes.com3/16/12
It’s a Brave, New, Social World
blogs.gartner.com3/8/12
Raising the At-Home Service Standard (For Best Results, Add Cloud Technology)
Sanjay Mathur, VP of Product Management
In a recent article in 1to1 Magazine, “Setting the At-Home Service Standard,” author Mila D’Antonio cites the higher overall quality of home agents as the critical reason why companies today are delivering better customer experiences as they transition customer service to a home-based workforce. But the real question is: Will better talent alone (aka better skilled agents)lead to the best results?
Let’s face it, talent is just the beginning. It’s having fuel without an engine. Sure, it’s why many companies are discovering the advantages of an at-home workforce. In reality the engine behind at-home success is the combination of cloud-based technology with cloud-based talent that is producing even better performance—the cloud is the difference to achieving better results faster and more consistently.
Moving to cloud-based technology means rethinking how you’re working with talent, in addition to identifying and sourcing talent. (I’ll save identifying, sourcing, and profiling for another blog.) Simply implementing the same traditional, on-premise approaches and tools doesn’t work when you’re striving to get the best out of a cloud workforce. Cloud-based talent requires new tools and new ways of managingremote workers to inspire performancethat is superior to an on-premise environment.
Take collaboration, for example. Home agents are already adept with online chat and forums to stay connected and access information. But there are times when real-time voice and face-to-face interactions can have a huge impact on the ability to more effectively communicate complex issues or deliver critical feedback. Just look at the recent launch of group video chat via Skype on Facebook or the new Google+ “Hangouts” feature, and you can see how similar technology could be implemented to take collaboration to a whole new level in the cloud-based work environment. We are at the forefront of a consumer-inspired, collaboration technologies boom that will change how we work. Smart cloud application developers are positioning themselves now to take full advantage of this opportunity to enable the workforce to perform better, faster, and more consistently.
And let’s not forget how cloud-based applications can transform how agents assess and improve their own individual performance. At-home workers require greater connectedness and more visibility into how they are performing against their peers, and this concept of “reputation” can lead to new and powerful motivation tools and techniques. The use of gamification feeds into human nature to compete on the basis of performance and then be rewarded for doing well and
reaching new heights. Those agents who compete well in the “games” that defines their work also provide a higher standard of service. Trust me, I’ve seen the proof.
The shift to higher quality home agents is well under way. With this shift is a new standard of excellence for customer service. If you haven’t moved to the cloud yet, what’s going to help you keep up with the new standard of customer service excellence?
Work is Moving to the Cloud
Regan Parker, Director of Workforce Innovation and Advocacy
With Monday’s announcement of iCloud, the tech world seemed to embrace, once and for all, that we are moving into the cloud. As Apple CEO, Steve Jobs said in his announcement, “we’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” Now, nobody has to be tethered to a PC or a device.
Just as the PC was once the hub of your digital life, the office has been the hub or your work life. But, no more. (more…)
Five questions to ask when choosing a cloud-based contact center
Jeremy King, EVP of Technology and Products
“Truly tested” is a phrase I don’t throw around lightly. But LiveOps’ decade of experience in managing a cloud-based workforce amounts to a virtual lifetime in our increasingly digital world, making LiveOps’ platform one of the only “truly tested” cloud-based contact centers in the industry.
Sifting through the moving parts of a contact center can be daunting but we’ve weathered enough storms at LiveOps to know what to look for. In an industry where needs change quickly, experience matters.
Here are five key questions to ask when deciding to migrate to a cloud contact center provider. (more…)
Go Big or Go Home: It’s All About Doing Big Things
Maynard Webb, CEO
As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m very passionate about what we do at LiveOps – not only because of the role we play in evolving the customer service industry, but because it creates an innovative and quality model for work. I couldn’t help but think about our work as I read the State of the Union address. A number of points struck a chord with me as a CEO but the one idea that resonated the most was: ”We do big things.”
It reminds me of my time at eBay – we did so many big things – and this same spirit and opportunity is the reason I chose to join LiveOps. We have been doing many big things. But, amazingly, the most rewarding part is not in the “bigness,” but in the individual pieces that are ultimately responsible for building a powerful (and big) story.
In the Internet world we used to have a phrase – you probably know it (and you probably loathe it): Go Big or Go Home. Although I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing with every ounce of your being or not at all, that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Going Big in this era is about something else. We at LiveOps are proud of the innovation and leadership role we play in transforming how sales and service work is done in contact centers. (more…)