Delivering the best customer experience possible is important for any company. Customer service can significantly impact the bottom line – positive support experiences result in new sales opportunities, as well as recurring business. With today’s digital communication tools, maintaining a good reputation can be a challenge. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and blogs have given customers the ability to voice their opinion publicly throughout the web. Keeping customers happy is more essential than ever before.

In our “Socializing Customer Support to Drive Business Value” webinar on Wednesday, March 28^th, Kate Leggett, Senior Analyst at Forrester, Timothy Kelly, Executive Director of Support at McKesson Physician Practice Solutions, and Evan Shumeyko, Director Social@Ogilvy at OgilvyOne Worldwide, joined us to discuss how to leverage social software to create social help centers for dramatic reductions in resolution time and increased alignment with sales initiatives.

In the webinar, Leggett shared that, “Ninety percent of customer service decision-makers say a good customer experience is critical to their company’s success and sixty-three percent think the importance of the customer experience has risen.”

Customer service decision makers are often torn between delivering great customer service and balancing operational costs to ensure KPIs, such as average handle time, number of cases handled, and adherence to compliance requirements are all in line. Yet, the biggest challenge support organizations encounter is the inability to efficiently access content. In many cases, there is a vast ocean of content and knowledge available, yet it is often distributed and impossible for a customer service representative to find. Obviously, this creates a less than desirable customer support experience.

The key to great customer service is communication. Content and experts within the company need to be accessible to those who handle customer issues. At Socialtext, we’re doing our part to increase internal collaboration and give companies the advantage they need to reach sales and customer service goals.

Socialtext’s social intranet allows communication to be done in real-time through activity and signal streams, and on various channels (or groups). Timothy Kelly discussed how McKesson uses various channels to keep its customer support teams informed including a customer channel, value added reseller channel, process policy and product content channels. Social channels are an efficient way to obtain accurate information quickly and McKesson wanted to implement a strategy that would have their support agents finding information they needed within one to four clicks, max.  Leveraging Socialtext’s activity streams, which are automatically populated with new content from the knowledge base and provide visibility into trending articles, enables McKesson’s support teams to access answers with single one click. Keyword searches, table of contents, labeling products, and a list of all key components to browse are also helpful resources that McKesson has delivered.

Now that customer service agents have the capability to find the right content to respond to support issues, McKesson is experiencing dramatic improvements in its key metrics across all of its teams. The average speed to answer has decreased 66%, same day resolution has improved by 12% and customer satisfaction is up. Customers now receive faster, better service as a result of McKesson’s support teams leveraging their social intranet. And with a customizable dashboard, agents can sync their interface strategically to maximize productivity.

Ogilvy’s Evan Shumeyko also presented a use case for a socialized customer support center, in this case consultative sales agents manning the front lines of a top-tier credit card company’s inbound calls for new products and campaigns.  With the challenge of bringing collaborative brand conversations to life inside the call center, Ogilvy turned to Socialtext. With Socialtext, Ogilvy achieved its goal of connecting people, process, technologies, and bringing innovation to the call center in a way that surfaces the most valuable nuggets of information and provides insight into content relevance.

Through the Socialtext dashboard, Ogilvy was able to create a virtual hub to push out the latest advertising campaigns, identify the informal experts around various topics, transplant knowledge, create call flows and act as a social media listening post.  Not only was the top sales agent the earliest adopter and user of Socialtext, the entire team benefited with an increase of 10% in conversions.

Customer service decision makers must find a balance between the needs of their customers and their business. Companies can benefit from a significant return on investment from social platforms, such as Socialtext, which allow agents to provide an excellent customer experience and strengthen customer loyalty. Agents can access up-to-date content to solve customer problems in a personalized way. In addition, agents are able to improve service skills, train and communicate about services on a daily basis. With access to the right tools, content and experts, employees can achieve a high level of customer satisfaction that will drive business and close more sales.

If you would like view a full recording of this webinar, please visit,  http://www.socialtext.com/solutions/webinar-socializing-customer-support.php.