A customer service representative (CSR) picks up the phone. How this conversation is conducted will fundamentally alter the customer's relationship with your company. It will create a lasting impression, the moment when you can deliver an experience that either increases customer loyalty or drives the customer to defect.

For years, customer service departments have suffered from the pull of opposing directives of improving level of service while simultaneously cutting costs. Contact centers created and implemented systems designed to facilitate private, one-to-one engagement with individual customers. During this time, demonstrating positive ROI has remained a constant challenge. Social media presents the opportunity to delight customers by resolving their issues on the channels of their choice, while significantly reducing the cost of each interaction. In fact, Gartner, the analyst firm, has found that social agents are able to handle 4-8x the number of issues per hour than a phone agent.

The public nature of social media also means that each successful interaction has the potential to be amplified into a peer-to-peer recommendation, delivering marketing benefit that is significantly greater - and more easily calculable - than on other channels. Research from NM Incite, a partnership between Nielsen and McKinsey & Company, found that consumers who encounter positive social care experiences are nearly three times more likely to recommend a brand to others. Yet, performing customer service over social media means engaging in a high volume of public interactions in which each misstep has the risk of attracting negative publicity for your brand. Your brand must therefore take care in properly setting up its social customer service program - taking all the steps necessary to minimize risk while optimizing results.

This guide is designed to help you deliver social customer service from the contact center as a standardized, scalable and ROI-positive operation that lives up to your brand’s promise of quality service.

Looking to discover a better way to deliver consistent customer service? Download this eBook to learn:

• How social and mobile are changing customer service for the better.

• Why tracking long-term customer loyalty gives you the best insight

• Why the CRM of the future will throw off the shackles of data

• How holistic case management can become the secret weapon for the best customer service

Are you measuring the right things to truly understand and optimize the customer experience you are delivering? Are you able to see your company from your customers’ perspective?

Learn how to use the event, transaction and interaction data you already have in your call center systems to gain new insights into the lifetime journey of your customers and as a result, answer these questions:

• Are you an easy company to do business with?

• What are all the steps your customer usually takes to purchase product, obtain service or resolve technical issues?

• Are you optimizing your operations around the right things?

• What can you do to increase the positive business outcomes of our customer interactions?