Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Baynote Exec Gives Insight on Social Media

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

Social media is becoming arguably the most critical customer interaction channel and is more popular than e-mail, according to some studies. A TMC webinar, “Keys to Successful Social CRM Programs” sponsored by SAP that took place Oct.20, outlined a Nielsen online study, “Global Faces on Networked Places” which revealed social member communities reach more Internet users (66.8 percent) than e-mail (65.1 percent). This sector is perhaps, not surprisingly, the fastest growing sector for Internet use: at 5.4 percent per year.

Baynote makes solutions that automatically display organizations’ personalized product and content recommendations to website visitors. It watches what all site visitors do and learns which products, pages and documents “like-minded” people prefer -- i.e., “people who liked this, also liked this...” TMCnet recently interviewed Carlos Carvajal, senior director of marketing at Baynote, to get his firm’s insights on several social media issues.

TMCnet: What are the key issues in utilizing social media in customer service and sales, and what are the best practices in managing them?CC: Social media usage in customer service and sales is entering a more mature phase where vendor leaders are emerging, best practices are being established, and companies are really experiencing some outstanding successes. A key challenge in this new wave is pinpointing what's relevant to communities as these groups get larger and content grows exponentially. After all, if a customer service environment isn't helping customers easily find what they want and need, then it's not doing its job.One way to address this is to use what Gartner (News - Alert) and others are calling “collective intelligence,” which allows companies to tap into the wisdom of the crowds on their sites to spot emerging trends and patterns among like-minded groups. Specifically, Collective Intelligence addresses the challenges in modern-day customer service by bringing to the surface the content and posts that are actually the most useful and relevant. It's also a highly scalable approach, minimizing the need for customer service and sales representatives to identify the best content by themselves. Instead, the crowd implicitly tells them what the most useful content is based on its collective actions of the entire community.TMCnet: Discuss the issue of accurate responses provided by the customer community, e.g. for service and support questions. Is this serious, getting better/worse and how do you effectively ascertain this to prevent problems?CC: Quality and accuracy continue to be an issue in service communities. With content added to these communities on a daily, hourly, even minute-to-minute basis, it's becoming essential for businesses to strengthen their noise filters. They need more efficient methods to ensure that the most important, accurate content for users bubble up to the top.Collective intelligence can help filter out the noise by automatically identifying what the community finds most valuable, whether in the form of user generated responses or something else. For example, for a site like TurboTax, what users are going to be looking for in March is quite different than what they'll need after tax season has come to a close. Collective intelligence can help the community self-guide itself to what's most useful at a given point in time.TMCnet: Outline the issue of power users. In which interactions types does it appear? How does your solution manage it?CC: The prototypical online community has several actors: creators (super-users) who contribute their expertise frequently and in large volumes; editors who occasionally add to existing conversations; and the silent majority - the audience who mostly consumes information rather than contributing to it (the 90-9-1 principle).This means that in most communities there a few very vocal members who rate or review content but whose views may not be necessarily indicative of the silent majority.A central concept of collective intelligence is to aggregate behaviors of the silent majority, augment that information with the expertise of the super-users, and provide the most relevant information that meets every user's goals.  In service and support environments, this somewhat radical view may necessitate a fresh look at how knowledge is gathered, codified, published and shared, but the benefits in terms of efficiency and scale vs. traditional expert/knowledge management approaches are likely to outweigh concerns about loss of control or ownership.Through our collective intelligence platform, Baynote helps service and support teams gain valuable customer insight by using Collective intelligence as a means to reflect the views of the entire community and not just those of power users. We watch the implicit behavior patterns of visitors to the site, such as mouse hovers and clicks, which can then be used to determine what content is actually useful to visitors and what they are engaging with most.Baynote helps support communities significantly cut down the level of noise by surfacing what is actually relevant, thereby minimizing support costs and improving the customer experience.