Embracing modern customer care without upsetting your CFO

We are all tired of the word ‘transformation,’ but it’s still the reality. I talk about legacy mountains in organizations; it’s still a huge obstacle. Legacy structures, processes, and mindsets, it’s very difficult for a functional leader to overcome those without the C-suite on board. We still have moats and drawbridges with how functions are communicating with each other; we’re not communicating very well.

Too often people see the contact center as the lowest of the low. When I talk to agents, they know more about what the customers want than the customers do. They have the answers. But organizations don’t trust their agents to intuitively know what is right for the customer. Yet, 99 percent of the time, they do. They just need to be trusted. Get a big bunch of customer-facing people in a room for three hours and ask them: What do customers do that is really annoying? They will list off everything and give you an amazing, low-cost roadmap of stuff you can fix right away. And it makes your customer-facing teams feel listened to.

Organizations have focused too much on quantitative social insights (impressions, engagement, reach) which aren’t business outcomes, and have underutilized and probably underappreciated the qualitative nature of Twitter data. This is in my opinion more insightful and more powerful as it's feedback that’s emotive, unprompted, and in the moment. Twitter is now 14 years old and I’m still surprised by the number of organizations that don’t have any processes or tools like Sprinklr to engage and manage their social engagement and therefore lots of Tweets and DMs go unanswered. Twitter is public by nature and so presents a great opportunity to humanize your brand and show you care.