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Using social media for customer self service

While social mediums are becoming important tools for hospitality providers who want to listen to and engage their customers more closely, as more people use it, it is also becoming harder to manage responses in reasonable timeframes.

There is a potential solution: taking the ubiquity and ease-of-use of social networks and creating a new self-service functionality. This is not advocating bot tweeting or scheduling Facebook service posts as we all know how horribly wrong these can go. It is suggesting the use of in-bound, self-service tools for Twitter, SMS, Web chat, etc., which can generate responses in most cases faster than any human can.

For example, say an air traveler is on his way to an airport to fly to a business meeting in New York and realizes he forgot to book a hotel room at his destination. With a simple tweet “@ABChotel_direct room needed at JFK today 5pm,” that customer can almost immediately have a response back from an automated system that knows his or her preferences and can send the necessary information to have a room booked within a tweet exchange or two. Note how the “_direct” account of “ABC Hotel” is explicitly declared an automated assistant account, as companies would not want to apply automation to a main account. Social networks like Twitter are still predominantly perceived as connecting humans to humans, and rightly so.

Some hospitality companies are now using SMS and text messages to send out reservation confirmation or information.  But when a personal touch is needed or requested, say a customer needs to cancel or change a reservation, those companies can provide a number or embedded link in those text message exchanges that directs the customer to an agent or a web page. This is better than it used to be, but certainly doesn’t take advantage of the true potential of this channel. By taking the automation a step further and engaging customers in interactive dialogs called Interactive Text Response (ITR), as the equivalent to Interactive Voice Response (IVR), customers can use tweets or SMS to easily make changes without ever speaking to a human, say for changing arrival times or room preferences. On Twitter, privacy concerns can be addressed by employing Twitter’s DM (private) channel that is password protected for two-way communications. There is little doubt that as smart phones are practically tethered to people’s bodies these days, the response rates from phone-based communication will be higher and faster than requiring them to make a return call or log onto a website to perform the tasks.

But does this take personal engagement out of the customer relationship if exchanges like these are automated? Not entirely. Automated self-service over SMS and social media can be used as a channel modification aimed at a growing number of consumers who are not only more comfortable with automated interaction they are often preferring it. Because ITR is easier, offers faster response times, and can be conducted on-the-go in loud or crowded places, it appeals to the mobile-savvy consumer who desires to engage with the companies they do business with on their terms and their schedules.

Automated SMS and social self-service also brings reality to the Omni-channel experience by enabling customer service interactions to start on an automated channel and seamlessly continue the conversation with context and history on a live agent channel without interruption. This ability is widely deployed for the phone channel today (IVR systems transferring to the call center and populating the agent’s screen with customer information as well as data entered during the IVR dialog), but a novelty on non-voice channels.

The beautiful thing about using social media or texting as an enhanced, interactive self-service channel is that it is not about asking consumers to learn something new or wait for state-of-the-art technologies to become mainstream. Automated self-service over SMS and social media is simply about using existing technologies on consumer-preferred channels to perform new tasks and getting customer service providers to more quickly adapt to changing user preferences – all resulting in better experiences and maybe even reduction on costs on the providers end.

 


 

Contributed by Tobias Goebel, director of mobile strategy, Aspect Software, Phoenix

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