Going social? Get engaged

Ask a question in your favorite social network or on a review site and within minutes you're likely to get a valid answer from someone who's had an experience like yours. It's no wonder consumers often seek information in online social settings, instead of going to the applicable corporate website. Businesses are taking note. From developing their corporate Facebook pages, to tweeting, to initiating social listening programs, 2011 is widely considered the year business went "social."

But when trying to find their footing in this space, many companies are challenged by the enormous amount of data created in response to their own social activity or simply by all the chatter about their brand in the social universe. And many are stumped when it comes to determining how best to respond or engage with their customers.

Experience Analytics: Social listening and intelligent engagement

Earlier this year, KANA integrated Experience Analytics (formerly Overtone) with the Service Experience Management (SEM) platform, extending its customer listening solution to social channels. Now organizations can identify important conversations across all customer channels, and participate directly with customers in that conversation through intelligent engagement capabilities.

Experience Analytics uses advanced text analytics to understand sentiment and identify topics and emerging issues from customer conversations and direct-to-company communications. What's being said about the brand or particular products–or about any elements deemed relevant to the enterprise–is monitored and analyzed in real time. Messages or posts that can impact the business or require a response are identified and routed to the appropriate stakeholders, and queued depending on selected value criteria.

The knowledge to take smart action

As part of SEM, Experience Analytics delivers information contextually through knowledge-infused processes. When an agent receives an inquiry or comment, contexts such as the relevant next steps and customer history are immediately apparent. For instance, if a customer tweets about an experience with your brand and the tweet is brought to an agent's attention, the Twitter profile will bring up the customer profile. Agents have a comprehensive view of the customer–of what, if any, cases are in process, of account details, of all communication between the customer and company across every channel–enabling relevant and targeted response.

See KANA's multichannel listening and engagement solution in action in this webinar with KANA CTO and Executive VP, Mark Angel: The Experience Revolution - Optimizing Customer Service Through Mobile, Social and Knowledge-Infused Process

Terms of engagement

When it comes to determining how best to engage customers in social media, the answer is not that different from how to best engage and interact with customers in other channels. Because how often you tweet, what kind of service response your customers expect from your brand, and what content you provide on Facebook, depends on understanding what customers want. It boils down to being in touch with them–to listening. If you're listening intelligently, you'll know if your customers have Facebooked you to receive more discounts–and not to learn about products, as the majority of businesses incorrectly assume.¹

In fact, while many businesses have begun listening to customers in social channels, many are simply monitoring the social conversation for red flags about their brand or products. Experience Analytics takes social media monitoring beyond mere defense tactic to enable effective business strategy.

The patented algorithms of KANA's sentiment analysis software identify posts that require an immediate response as well as emerging topics and concerns that should be addressed to avoid customer dissatisfaction in general. A clear graphical dashboard provides big picture insights—such as where a certain product stands in the conversation, the volume of talk about a particular subject, the sentiment expressed about your product versus a competitor's, and so forth.

With a comprehensive overview, the ability to drill down into the who, what, when and where of a given post, and knowledge-infused processes to guide communication, you can not only respond directly to the social conversation but adapt service processes in light of what you've learned.

The result? A powerful "listen, analyze, engage" feedback loop that lets you take advantage of the tremendous opportunities in social media to connect with customers, boost loyalty and deliver good customer service.

¹http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/social_medias_impending_flood.html

Good service is social and context-driven

When knowledge management solutions first entered the market over a decade ago, the world of customer service was a very different place. Internet adoption was still on the rise, and most users simply picked up the phone for help. Today, the internet is often the first line of support. Web self-service solutions have expanded to include thousands of articles powered by intelligent search engines. As sophisticated as these systems may be, customers are increasingly seeking help in new ways – Facebook, Twitter, and other online communities. What is the value of these new sources of knowledge? And what role should the customer service organization play in these channels?

When monitored properly, these channels can be an asset to an organization. Their informal nature encourages open and honest communication, allowing customers to show their expertise by helping each other build brand loyalty. However, it is critical to monitor these channels by both listening and acting. Listening for frequently occurring topics and specific posts identifies where a customer needs additional help. Once the listening solution finds these posts, the next step is action. When a customer requires more assistance, his post can be escalated to an agent. The agent will leverage internal knowledge and other tools to respond to the inquiry, and repost to the original request. Using these opportunities to highlight your ability to provide great service can turn a potentially publicized negative experience into a positive one. Secondly, recurrent topics in social media indicate knowledge gaps. When customers cannot find what they need on your website, they will seek answers elsewhere. Often, community experts help one another to discover solutions. While these communal fixes are beneficial, it is important to formalize this information. Customers want validation that answers are certified, and will ultimately expect to find these answers in the knowledgebase. An organization can act on this information by authoring new knowledge. By providing a link to the new article in the online community, you can increase knowledgebase adoption, while at the same time providing credit to "experts" within your customer base, encouraging them to continue adding helpful information.

In the end, these new channels are opportunities to mine useful knowledge and publicly showcase your customer service. When these sites are appropriately monitored and acted upon, they can act as an extension of your brand, and a critical component of your web self-service strategy. So, if customers can find answers to their questions in these outside channels, why should they use your web self-service website? To increase customer adoption on your site, companies must move beyond static FAQ style help. To do this, consider two critical factors: context and process.

Context is the information known about the customer in order to personalize the experience. This can be a user's location, products, preferences, or any other piece of profile information. Applying context produces more accurate and relevant knowledge, and makes each experience a personalized one. Leveraging context can also allow the knowledge management system to proactively suggest pertinent knowledge to a user based on his or her profile. Since social channels do not have access to this wealth of internal information, these websites are unable to provide the level of personalization you can offer on your site.

The self-service experience is also enhanced by knowledge infused process. Knowledge is far more relevant when viewed in the context of a particular process. With static knowledge, customers must explicitly search for answers to a question. This often means leaving a process page of the web site and navigating to a help page. Knowledge infused process dynamically presents relevant knowledge combined with each step of a process. Many novice users prefer to be guided through a process rather than search through thousands of articles for a solution. Additionally, finding the right knowledge article may not be achievable through search alone. In some cases, the right answer to a question depends on the particular task being worked. Again, these capabilities are not available on informal social channels, so you can provide a differentiated experience for your customers in this way.

Offering unique web self-service capabilities that leverage your context and process will encourage customers to use your website as their first line of defense to resolve issues, giving you the best opportunity to deflect calls and improve customer satisfaction.

Create a self-service experience that not only meets, but exceeds customer expectations with KANA's solution suite. Contact KANA to help you design an exceptional self-service experience for your valued customers and learn more about self-service in our white paper, "Designing the Great Self-Service Experience" from our website, http://www.kana.com/better-practices/white-papers.php.

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Digital By Default

As part of its austerity measures, the UK Government is putting serious effort into reducing the cost of service delivery and has introduced several austerity programs. One of these, 'Digital by Default' focuses on reducing the cost of handling government to citizen engagements by encouraging citizens to use cheaper digital channels instead. Sometimes referred to as 'channel shifting' in the UK, some UK Government departments have come under fire for implementing this online government strategy. The UK tax office, HMRC, in particular has critics who claim that digital channels exclude the vulnerable and needy. External criticism is one thing, but when it comes from UK Government Members of Parliament and the UK's Treasury Committee, it's time to take notice.

Whilst there is no doubt that the UK Government — indeed all governments — must look at ways to reduce costs across the board, including in citizen engagement, they cannot do this at the expense of those who can't — or won't — use digital channels.

In simple terms there are three different stakeholders here:

• Government
• The digital citizen
• The non-digital citizen

And, unlike many of the stereotypes you will have seen on the digital citizen and the non-digital citizen, they aren't necessarily segmented by age. My wife, who will kill me for writing about her, mostly refuses to have anything to do with technology; whereas my mother — who just turned 76 — is on Facebook and reads my tweets.

So does the UK Governments 'Digital by Default' strategy (or indeed HMRC's strategy) exclude the vulnerable or needy or, more generally, the non-digital citizen? Is it in fact a 'Digital by Exclusion' strategy?

Well, no, I don't think so. Essentially what they're trying to do is design service delivery for digital consumption first thereby minimizing the ongoing related cost of citizen engagement, but they should also be designing for the non-digital citizen, too. In other words, the strategy is signalling a change in mindset; a re-framing of thinking for the digital age.

The exciting thing is that this approach can generate benefits previously not possible in government, including helping make our communities safer, benefiting everyone including the vulnerable and needy.

If you'd like to find out more about this and other benefits, watch the videos of me speaking at the 'Digital by Default' conference in London on 1st December.

David Moody is VP Solutions Marketing, KANA

North Ayrshire Council Deploys KANA Mobile Solution — Lagan Mobile

Lagan Mobile Will Support Increased Citizen Engagement and Cleaner, Safer Streets.

North Ayrshire Council is the first council in Scotland to launch an integrated "Report It" app using the Lagan Mobile solution in a move that is expected to lead to cleaner, safer streets and lower administrative costs.

North Ayrshire Council has launched the iPhone App for citizens to download free and use to pinpoint issues while on the move. The App takes advantage of the features of the iPhone, using photos and GPS to support the precise description and location of street–based issues and enabling citizens to track the resolution of their issue. Intelligent routing and seamless integration with Lagan CRM will enable problems ranging from graffiti and fly tipping to traffic light failures and potholes to be reported instantly to the responsible council team.

There were a number of factors influencing North Ayrshire's decision; as part of a review of their channel shift strategy they were keen to embrace new mobile technology, this project gave them the opportunity to put their toe in the water as use as a proof of concept for future business cases. Lagan Mobile proved particularly attractive as it is fully integrated passing straight from the citizen to the back office without touching the contact centre.

"We're delighted to be extending our service experience for citizens using this innovative on-demand solution. Crucially, unlike other apps and websites, the Lagan solution links directly to our systems. The fact that all this happens in the cloud means that we have no additional hardware requirements — making it easier and quicker for us to deploy. It provides a great opportunity to explore how we can best use smartphone technology to broaden our engagement with the community and put real power in the hands of local residents," said Esther Gunn-Stewart, Customer Services Manager at North Ayrshire Council.

The initiative has been championed by the Improvement Service in Scotland. "We are happy to assist North Ayrshire Council with the development and release of this solution. It will help meet customers' expectations in the digital age and is designed to take cost and demand out of the system for North Ayrshire. It is an important part of the wider Customer First channel shift programme in Scotland and highlights our commitment to make more key services available online," said Martin Brown, Head of Customer Relationship Management, at the Improvement Service.

Key to the success of the "Report It" app was the launch programme. North Ayrshire Council took a multi- channel approach engaging with citizens via email and directly at Council events and at shopping centres. In parallel they used social media — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — and managed to secure both the front page coverage in the local paper and an item in the National TV news station. App downloads have steadily increased since the launch.

Lagan Mobile is part of the growing Lagan suite of applications that provide solutions for government organizations in support of their Channel Shift strategies through the Web, Smartphones and Social Media like Twitter and Facebook.

According to David Moody, co-founder of Lagan and VP Solutions Marketing at KANA "The use of mobile devices to communicate with local councils is something we expect to soar in the years ahead. All over the world, local governments are looking at ways in which smartphones can create a closer link between local residents and the people directly responsible for service delivery and, in so doing, improve service, and reduce cost. Lagan Mobile is designed to help make this happen."