Businesses that engage directly with consumers must have a way of dealing with customer feedback. Reacting to customer views, whether good or bad, is integral to improving service performance. Contact centres are therefore key to customer relationship management.

Contact centres are the first port of call for issue resolution and the core arena for customer engagement. In some cases, the first time a consumer directly interacts with a company will be through a contact-centre, so it’s critical that centres function well and reflect positively on the business. In the past, contact centres could more accurately be described as call centres, with most interaction happening via telephony technologies. However, the advent of the internet and email has expanded their remit, and most contact centres are now expected to deal with several channels of communication.

Recently, a further channel has been added, due to the explosion of social media. Customers can now give their views on a company through an array of applications, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. These peer to peer conversations happen at a rapid pace, and turning a blind eye can not only result in missed opportunities, but also reputation damage. It’s up to businesses to make the most of this new communication stream and use it to their advantage.

But how can a company monitor this constant deluge of information, and more importantly, respond to it?

Social media communities require a different set of monitoring and engagement processes to telephony and email. Therefore, many organisations choose to outsource operations to independent social media consultants. Social media experts will of course be adept at handling and responding to customer feedback through social networking sites. However, moving this process outside the business core can be expensive, and may result in a fractured and fragmented contact centre. The ideal scenario is if a contact centre can handle all the traditional elements, but also integrate social media engagement. This adds value and diversity to the business, while also increasing staff skill.

It is possible for contact centres to converge their communication channels and handle all customer interaction, including social media, through a single platform. Communication convergence technologies can put social networks on the same level as telephony and email. Monitoring and responding to social media mentions then becomes equivalent to answering a telephone call, or replying to an email. Agents can use their existing desktop infrastructure to react to all manner of social media feedback.

This single platform software works best when backed by high-powered analysis tools, which can analyse all mentions of a company on social networks, and then route these incidents to the most suitable agent.

Social media has grown exponentially in recent times. For contact centres, it’s beneficial to keep operations in-house, and interact and respond to social media in the same way a business would to a traditional telephone enquiry.