And how is that relevant to your contact centre?
Just in case you have been living in a cave or on a desert island for the past 20 years, social media is now a daily part of our lives and Social media user numbers have surged in the past 12 months, with 520 million new users joining social media in the year to July 2021.
Here are a few stats for you to chew on. Source Hootsuite
In terms of a communications channels in use in your contact centre and keeping your customer experience and customer satisfaction stats where they need to be then ignore social media at your peril. Here are a few stats for you that are pertinent to the contact centre business
Facebook has 2.853 billion monthly active users.
WhatsApp has around 2 billion monthly active users.
Facebook Messenger has around 1.3 billion monthly active users.
WeChat (inc. Weixin 微信) has 1.242 billion monthly active users
I always found it interesting that when I lived in the Middle East, everyone used Whatsapp to communicate. However, when I sent whatsapp messages to friends in the UK they didn't respond very quickly, there seemed to be a much broader use of messenger. So from that little personal observation, although the above numbers are suggesting Whatsapp as the leader there are regional preferences.
Given that the use of social media continues to rise year on year and that 99% of people are using their mobile phones it would suggest that your contact centre needs to keep up with these trends and that you need to offer at least Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger as an optional channel to voice and chat.
This is the point where we get back to the Omnichannel topic. As I mentioned in a previous article, at Mercuricall we offer an Omnichannel solution where every agent has the ability to interact simultaneously on voice (which takes priority), chat, sms, email, Whatsapp and Messenger.
It's clear, people are changing in terms of their communication preferences so in terms of CX and Customer Sat for the Millennials and beyond, at some point in the future you are going to need to give your customers the communications channels that they use most frequently.
The Mercuricall Group, based in Europe and the USA and operates internationally. We are a providers of Next Generation Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) software. See more Mercuricall articles on contact centre related topics by clicking here.
