"Social engagement" sounds like the kind of thing Fred Astaire would have worn a top hat and tails to, in some old movie. As a generic technology term, it's what many enterprises want to try and do with their customers via public social networks--it's something that many contact center vendors are adding to their platforms to take advantage of a new communication channel.
Social Engagement is also the name of a just-announced Genesys release from Alcatel-Lucent, where the aim is not just to open the floodgates of potential mentions of your enterprise on Twitter and Facebook--but to automate your classification and categorization of that information torrent, so that you can understand what's being said, whether it deals with a specific situation and is therefore "actionable," as ALU calls it, or whether it's more general in nature.
In many ways this area is the cutting edge where Unified Communications meets social networking. Plugging APIs into Twitter and Facebook and whatever other social network is important to your customers--that's the relatively easy part. Doing analysis of what you collect from that integration, and understanding what it means to your enterprise--that's the real challenge.
Alcatel-Lucent is adding the new Social Engagement component to the Genesys Suite. This diagram illustrates where the new component sits in terms of the customer contact workflow:
The top half of that "funnel" is what we've become used to seeing: The enterprise collects mentions from social networks and feeds it into the customer contact system. What Social Engagement is positioned to do is to sort through those mentions and use analytics to determine what's "actionable," and needs to go to a CSR in the contact center, versus what's more atmospheric and should be directed to the social media/marketing team at the enterprise.
Lisa Abbott, Senior Product Marketing Manager at ALU, explained the difference: "Actionable" items are complaints or other issues about a specific event that needs to be addressed--for example, somebody tweets about a specific problem they're experiencing with a product or service. This would get routed to the CSR and--importantly--the CSR would reach out to the individual in the same social medium that the person used to initiate the communication.
That's important, because you're addressing the person in the medium they've shown themselves to be comfortable with--you're not freaking them out by calling up and saying, "Hey, I saw you tweeted about this problem you were having...." Also, Lisa said, the enterprise should probably do its response from an institutional account, so that the customer feels they're getting a response from the company that they're having the issue about.
From here you could move the customer along to the Subject Matter Expert in the middle of the bottom row in the diagram, if they need that higher level of assistance.
The kind of communications that go to the Social Media/Marketing folks are those that deal with items that aren't "actionable," at least not in the immediate term. Though I had my briefing with Lisa before the Super Bowl, the infamous Groupon Tibet ad would fit in this category: Groupon starts seeing thousands of tweets slamming them for making light of the plight of Tibet--the marketing team needs to get on it (for them this is actually very actionable).
In some ways the Groupon example isn't an ideal one here, because the issue got so large so quickly that Groupon didn't really need some automated tool to know that they had a problem. But some more isolated or localized incident could more easily fly under the radar of a multi-national company, and here a tool like Social Engagement would help them pick up on it sooner.
The analytics in the Social Engagement software deal not only with actionability, but also sentiment analysis--is the communication positive, negative or neutral? Negative communications get top priority.
ALU is also massaging into Social Engagement some analytics that Lisa conceded are still works in progress, and that common sense says are as much art as science. One metric is the influence of the communicator. An obvious way to measure this is their connections in social networks--e.g., how many Twitter followers they have--but this obviously isn't a straightforward equivalence.
Another analytic component is the customer's value to the enterprise. This is a little more straightforward for the enterprise to build metrics for--connecting Social Engagement to the CRM system and leveraging its metrics can help the enterprise determine if the person that's tweeing (or whatever) is an existing customer, and if so how high a value customer he or she is.
Tools like Social Engagement are going to be key differentiators for contact center solutions. The better a tool can be at helping enterprises understand what's being said about them and what to do about it, the more successful a differentiator that tool will be.
