Last week we saw news from Convergys stating that Social Media as a customer service tool is steadily growing in the outsourcing hub of the Philippines, with their non-voice service offerings slowly seeing growth. "We do a fair amount of non-voice BPO (such as) back-office email management, chat processing, coupons processing and claims processing, among others," said Convergys president of customer management Andrea Ayers.
This is great news, considering all the hype over the last couple of years about Social Media with very low take up rates from organisations and consumers...
However, we still understand that Social Media as a channel to contact an organisation is still very low, in fact 6% of consumers across the globe have used a Social Media channel to contact an organisation in the last 3 months (2011 Avaya Contact Centre Consumer Index – conducted by Fifth Quadrant).
Social Media may include many things, from social sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr through to social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
Ron Jones' Social Media definition captures the phenomenon well:
"Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online."
It is important to bear in mind that although consumers are increasingly using Social Media, they tend to do so for personal reasons and not so much as a contact channel with Organisations.
Other key findings from the 2011 Avaya Contact Centre Consumer Index include:
- Social Media as a contact channel for Organisations tends to be lower across Asia than that seen in the Caribbean and Latin America region
- Preference for using the Social Media channel is lower than actual usage of the channel (2% of consumers prefer to use the Social Media channel vs 6% that have used the Social Media channel in last 3 months)
- Based on consumer intentions, the use of Social Media as contact channel to interact with customer service centres is not predicted to grow significantly in the next 1-2 years
If you would like more info on these results please contact Brydie murphy7@avaya.com.
