We’ve said before that it is critical to know what social sites are being used most by your customers, but this bears repeating because the value your customers see in them – and how they use them – is constantly changing.Pew Research Center, in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, recently published a list of social sites ranked by their value as a news source – and the numbers are telling.Leading the pack is Reddit with 62 percent, followed by Twitter (57 percent) and Facebook (47 percent). Despite its infancy, Google+ has already snagged 30 percent of the market, and Tumblr rounds out the top five with 29 percent.More and more today, the service center is playing a major role in both monitoring and responding to social comments on sites like these, so having constant access to them is necessary for call center agents to do their jobs well. Wherever your customers are, your company is likely there as well. Your agents should be up to speed on your company’s social presence at all times.One suggestion could be integrating social RSS feeds with your call center applications. Or, you can create a daily e-mail or intranet that reports the latest customer trends. Your agents need to be up to date on the latest technology and digital media, too, so include this in their periodic training. Your employee base is also a great source for uncovering customer trends. For instance, ask them what kinds of devices they carry and what’s hot on the Web, then sit back and listen to the discussion.The feedback you glean will, in many ways, mirror customer behavior and will without question go a long way toward helping you understand and stay on top of your customers’ behaviors. It can even put you ahead of the trends if you maintain a regular employee feedback program.Today’s multi-channel call center applications can help you integrate all these capabilities. For more information about multi-channel contact center applications, click here.
