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More Than Just Live Chat — Announcing Facebook and Twitter Integration in Comm100 Live Chat

Today’s customers want everything on their terms. They expect to be able to contact companies quickly, easily and over the communication channel that they choose.

That’s why we’re launching a huge new feature that redefines the abilities of our Live Chat product. Social media integration is now available for all Enterprise customers on our shared servers – enabling you to easily serve your customers on the platforms they use most in their everyday lives.

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So why is social media such an important method of customer communication? Statistics from top researchers in the field speak for themselves: nearly 70% of consumers say they have used social media to engage with businesses on at least one occasion. And the trend is growing – Twitter themselves say that over the last two years, tweets to leading brands’ customer service usernames have grown 2.5 times.

With the ability for social media to be integrated within our product, you can implement a well-organized social media workflow which cuts down on the number of systems, screens and passwords that your agents have to handle, and gives you a clear view of the messages and replies being sent to and from your teams.

Why integrate social media within our live chat product? Well, live chat and social media are perfect partners when it comes to agent skillsets. Your live chat agents are already customer service pros, and they know how to work with words to build a fantastic impression of your brand. Bringing in this capability within your live chat product means you’re effectively merging two channels into one – making social media customer service easier to handle, for you and for your agents.

Let’s take a look at how this new feature works.

The Basics

To enable social integration, you will need to add the details of the Facebook pages or Twitter accounts you wish to link with Comm100 Live Chat. Once linked, all agents within your system will be able to use these accounts to respond to social media messages through these platforms.

You’ll notice that a new tab called Social will be visible within your Agent Console. Clicking on this tab opens up our new interface.

There’s a host of different functions available to your agents from this interface.

Filters

Filters can be used to view selections of conversations according to your needs – for example, to view all open conversations, or conversations assigned to your department. You can also create manual filters using a number of different criteria, to view only the conversations that matter to you most.

Conversation List

All social media messages are shown within a conversation list, allowing you to see customers who have contacted you via either channel. Quick view icons show you, at a glance, whether a message is new, what channel it came in on, and what priority has been assigned to it.

Conversation Content

Within the content of the conversation, you can see all messages that have been sent to and from your customer. Replies can be sent quickly and easily through this area, and you can use the same hashtags or emojis you’re accustomed to.

Conversation Info & History

It’s easy to view and edit key information about each conversation. You can put conversations into pend, set priority, assign cases to a specific agent or team, and add wrap-up notes. You can also view the history of a customer’s contact with you.

The details within the Social Media Tab are updated in real-time – ensuring that your team have access to the latest tweets and Facebook posts. Click here to see what kinds of Facebook and Twitter interactions will generate conversations in your Comm100 Live Chat account.

These features are designed to mirror the functionality available within social media platforms themselves, with the extra bonuses of being able to sort, filter, label and prioritize conversations according to the needs of your team and your business.

Complex Cases? Multiple Accounts? No Problem.

Let’s say Andrew gets on Twitter and tweets your business with a question. His friends Dave, Jim and Mike see his tweet and come dogpiling into the conversation to give their perspectives in their own tweets, with Andrew replying to each of them. It would be easy for a time-pressed agent to be confused about who needs replies to which tweets – risking you missing queries and annoying potential customers.

Our integration is designed to group together Twitter conversations from the same customer, creating new cases from other people where appropriate. It also allows you to view a full conversation history so that responses go to the right person at the right time, and giving your agents full context for every interaction.

Within Facebook, we’ve adopted a two-level hierarchy to mirror the structure on Facebook itself, taking away any unnecessary complexity from our interface.

Another area that we have covered is the ability to link up multiple accounts. Say your business handles two major products, with separate Twitter and Facebook accounts for each. It’s not a problem to link them all up and have your agents interact from the most appropriate account – all within one console, and without needing to worry about logging in or out of accounts.

Even for the busiest and most complex of social media accounts, our social media integration makes it easier for you to get your team working efficiently on your customers’ queries.

A Helping Hand for Your Team

Imagine that your customer Janie sends you a Facebook post with a technical query about your product. It’s picked up by an agent on your social media team, who replies to Janie confirming that they’ll need to find some more information from another team and will get back to her with a response.

Your agent emails your technical team, but somehow Janie’s query gets forgotten by them… and as time passes, your agent forgets all about it too.

Nothing within your social media platform can prompt you to check for that email from the team. Two weeks later Janie sends another post, angry and upset that she was forgotten and ignored – causing a public and embarrassing social media crisis that should never have happened.

With our platform you can pend a conversation awaiting a response from an internal or an external party, ensuring that you can check up on those conversations and they don’t just get lost in the noise of the rest of your social media activity.

Social media wasn’t exactly made for businesses, and social media platforms aren’t the most business-friendly applications. With our new integration, however, you can handle social media just as professionally as you handle any other customer communication channel.

Want to Learn More?

For businesses starting to tackle social media customer service for the first time, creating an effective plan can be a daunting task. Even for those businesses who are up and running, social media can be so complex that it’s easy for queries to be handled in a less-than-optimal way.

Get in touch if you’d like us to show you how our platform can work for you. We’ll work with you to figure out how our product can help you achieve your social media aims and goals, and how you can get ready to reap the benefits!

It’s proven that when a company engages with customer requests over social media, customers end up spending 20% to 40% more. So not only do you stand to gain a huge boost to your business – you’ll be in a fantastic place to start putting more smiles on the faces of your customers by helping them get in touch with you even more easily.

Interested to learn more about how to plan for your new social media channel? Click here to access a copy of our eBook with best practice tools, tips, strategies and techniques to help you master social media customer service!

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Kaye Chapman

About Kaye Chapman

Kaye is an internationally-experienced writer and trainer, and an MA graduate of University College London, the world’s #1 center for Education and Social Science. Kaye has worked with Fortune 500, governmental and private firms across the world to advance customer service operations and embed leading learning and development strategy. As a specialist in Contact Centers, Kaye is passionate about using technology and training to improve experiences for customers and employees alike. Connect with her on LinkedIn.