As marketing and the call center increasingly become tightly intertwined, organizations are looking for ways to unify their interactions with customers. Right now, within most organizations, there is little to no coordination between the customer support activities that take place in the call center and their social media activities.
Looking to bridge that divide, Moxie Software this week announced the integration of its social networking software that is aimed primarily at call center applications with Facebook. According to Tara Sporrer, vice president of marketing for Moxie Software, the goal is to make it easier for customer support personnel to know a lot more about the social profiles of the people they are contacting. Armed with social graph information from Facebook, Sporrer says customer service representatives will be able to have a more relevant conversation with each customer they contact.
At a time when many organizations are questioning the return on investment in social media, Moxie is trying to provide a way that not only justifies those investments, but also eliminates the need to invest in separate social media management software, says Sporrer. In addition, Moxie has begun integrating its social networking software that is delivered as a service with customer relationship management applications such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
In the future, Moxie intends to support other social networks. But for the moment, Facebook is the most popular medium with the consumers that most organizations are trying to convert from being merely fans to highly engaged customers. Conversely, they also want to know who among those customers may be predisposed to favor offerings from rival vendors.
While there are still some obvious privacy issues that need to be addressed when trying to sell anything using social media, just about everybody appreciates any effort to provide value in a way that doesn’t waste people’s time. Social media outlets such as Facebook provide that opportunity at a time when the call center is increasingly becoming the vehicle through which many organizations establish their deepest relationships with the customer.
