Dennis Stoutenburgh Discusses Social Customer Service in CRMXChange Interview

During the 2014 Call Center Week event, Social Strategy1 President and Co-Founder Dennis Stoutenburgh sat down with CRMXchange to elaborate on social customer service for the first installment of a series of reports that will reveal perspectives and insights from a cross-section of the solution providers.

So, why Social Customer Service? Simply put, it should be at the forefront of any successful customer management strategy. One of the last remaining competitive advantages for any business is a customer’s experience with their brand - online and offline.

“It’s an investment, but one that will pay big dividends as the nature of social is one to many,” said Dennis, “Good or bad interactions are shared instantly at scale. Look at Zappos as a company that is clearly managing the customer experience correctly and has experienced explosive growth as a result. With social Interactions, customer care is marketing.”

CRMXchange

CRMXchange has long been recognized as a premiere destination on the Internet for the exchange of information and ideas on customer relationship management, sales, contact center, and telemarketing issues.

Call Center Week

Call Center Week is widely recognized as one of the industry’s most comprehensive educational and product information events. This year’s event, themed “Competing with Service: Seize the Opportunity” attracted more than 1,500 call center professionals to exchange ideas, explore emerging technologies, hear from leading authorities, and discuss what’s working in contact centers across a broad range of industries.

What do you consider the most important benefits that providing effective social customer service brings to organizations?

Meeting a customer in their preferred channel exhibits an understanding and willingness by brands to show they truly care about the customer experience. Simmering issues that are responded to quickly with a path to resolution or a simply apology for a poor experience do wonders to defuse a potentially dangerous online viral issue.

Are you seeing increased awareness on the part of businesses for the need for social customer service?

Absolutely. A number of companies are still hesitant due to the negativity associated with some poor decisions made by other brands that have gone viral. We have technology and personnel that mitigate the chances of a poor decision (by someone in the organization) going viral.

How do companies integrate social customer service with other channels such as voice, chat, email and SMS?

Most either are not or are still in the learning process. There are three components that need to work together for this to work properly: strategy, technology, execution (people, training, skill sets). It’s an investment, but one that will pay big dividends as the nature of social is one to many. Good or bad interactions are shared instantly at scale. Look at Zappos as a company that is clearly managing the customer experience correctly and has experienced explosive growth as a result.

“With social interactions, customer care is marketing.”

Finally, the gathering of all this client-initiated data should be used as part of a company’s overall growth strategy. Too often companies are satisfied to simply “handle” a customer service issue, but not learn from it.

What would you like CRMXchange readers to know about your company?

At Stratus, we work with companies to maximize and optimize customer Interactions and experience.

One of the key measurements of success in any contact center environment is achieving a higher level of customer satisfaction. Businesses are increasing their use of sophisticated knowledge management tools, behavioral analytics, and contact center technologies to better engage their customers while improving agent performance and productivity.  Companies are seeking solutions that offer ease of implementation, flexibility and the potential for rapid ROI.  In this report on emerging innovations presented at Call Center Week, CRMXchange provides a look at some of the strategies of solution providers in the customer satisfaction and knowledge management space.

Get everyone’s perspective by checking out the full interview now.