Social media will result in long-term changes to the communication behavior of our society. How can technology keep up with this change? How will a modern contact center fulfill customer needs? Bucher + Suter has jointly developed integration solutions with top manufacturers that can be incorporated into existing infrastructures.  

One thing is clear: social media and hence social networks (application platforms) will definitively change the way that companies interact with their customers. And this time the change appears to be a long term one. Social media communication reflects electronically what can be observed in a bustling town square: people exchanging news, chatting, discussing, complaining or making suggestions.

The fact that companies are placing more and more emphasis on the use of social networks shows beyond a doubt that they have recognized the potential of online-based communication. Take Twitter, for example. Among other things, it is being used for the wide range dissemination of real time information, for opinion research, and for raising awareness levels.

Addressing customer needs with social CRM

In Twitter, companies have found a distribution channel by which news or trends can be disseminated quickly and efficiently to large or small target groups. Companies are hiring social media specialists, who are playing key roles in the creation and implementation of their social CRM strategies. Why incur this expense? By leaving their "cyber tracks" in the social media zone, customers are indirectly telling the companies where and how they spend their time and what they think of products or situations.

The role of the contact center in the scope of social media

Because end customers reveal a great deal concerning their impressions of a company, a product, or a solution in social media, as a company it pays off to communicate via this channel as well. What area of a company does this? It should come as no surprise that social media specialists are employed for this purpose, often as contact center agents. In doing so, it is important that they proceed in a controlled manner. Here are two scenarios that are worth thinking about:

·        Contact center agents can separate comments from social media channels from other channels.

·        Small and specialized teams can moderate specific social media interactions and thus supply their social network community with relevant news and marketing [information].

Enormous investments by contact center providers

Manufacturers such as Cisco Systems have developed product strategies for fulfilling these new communications needs, specifically for enabling the integration of social media in the existing ICT infrastructure. The investment level that these manufacturers  are undertaking is anything but financially conservative: they are competing with entire platform development strategies for the weighty impact that social media will have on sustainable business.    

Launching new social networks

In the coming months, some of these manufacturers will be introducing upgrades to existing platforms or even entirely new platforms to the market. These will enable their customers to integrate various social media channels into their own customer service strategies. The companies will learn how to use the enormous online network, so that they are linked to their end customers on a daily basis, to their advantage. They will also learn the right way to use this network to protect their own company brand(s).  

Intelligent filtering of tweets

New social networks demand novel, intelligent integration solutions. With the b+s Multi-Channel Application Link (MCAL), Bucher + Suter has developed a framework for incorporating social networks such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook into Cisco‘s Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE). A Twitter integration, for instance, enables companies to intelligently filter public social media updates ("tweets") by continuously scanning them for keywords corresponding to the respective sector or marketing campaign. If these public tweets fulfill the defined criteria, they are forwarded to Cisco UCCE for further processing. By means of intelligent routing these tweets are sent to the agents who are best suited to respond to them. Furthermore, the twitterer account and the tweets are filed and tracked. When needed the conversation can be shifted from the public to the private sphere, where the exchange between enterprise and individual can be continued in private.

Bucher + Suter received the Cisco Partner to Partner Collaboration Award in 2010 in recognition of its many years of outstanding performance in this area.  

Bucher + Suter is one of the pioneers in the contact center sector. This Swiss software manufacturer set up the world’s first Cisco VoIP contact center ten years ago. Cooperation with various manufacturers and ICT partners worldwide is a key aspect of the development and project work of contact center specialists. One may well imagine what it takes in terms of extensive know-how to implement new contact center solutions or to expand existing environments. Most contact centers must closely integrate with the rest of the organization’s systems and they therefore demand compatible and reliable interfaces. The Bucher + Suter  partnership model, in which the ICT partner is responsible for the IT environment and b+s is responsible for the contact center, has continuously proven itself for many years. In November 2010, Cisco Systems awarded Bucher + Suter the Partner-to-Partner-Collaboration Award for outstanding performance in the area of partner cooperation.

For b+s‘ partners, this award is an affirmation of their choice to do business with a world class  partner in the contact center  field.

"We work with b+s on a number of contact center customer projects. We recently jointly implemented the telepresence project for the Noser Group. b+s played a decisive role in the implementation. The comprehensive know-how and thorough understanding of complex communications systems distributed over various sites and organizations is what impressed us. We wouldn’t hesitate to recommend b+s as a partner," says Luigi Micoccio, Account Manager, Swisscom Switzerland.

Last fall, b+s and Swisscom jointly equipped the Noser Group with Cisco’s innovative real time video conferencing system.

A few months ago the Noser Group acquired a modern video conferencing system. Bucher + Suter, one of 5 Noser Group subsidiaries, set up the Cisco telepresence system in cooperation with Swisscom. Eight Noser Group sites  in two countries now have online video meeting rooms of 4 to 8 seats that and are not only linked with each other but also with all Cisco and Swisscom telepresence sites.

"A high image resolution plus top audio quality make it possible for the first time ever to hold a meeting in a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere. The real time conferencing system greatly facilitates cooperation among the different company sites. Travel time and travel expenses are a thing of the past; which is good not only for the company budget but also for the environment," says Ruedi Noser, Chairman of the Noser Group Supervisory Board and Swiss National Councilman (FDP).

Many people reading this heading are reminded of Sylvester and Tweety, that cartoon series starring the yellow canary whom a somewhat elderly lady always managed save from the hungry black and white cat. 

The term "tweets" is indeed derived from the English verb "to tweet", which is what posting messages on Twitter is called. Posting "tweets"  makes one a "twitterer." Rebroadcasting another twitterer’s message is known as "retweeting."

And then of course there are the readers, who incidentally are known as "followers."

Twitter is in fact capable of disseminating information throughout the world faster than TV and online media. How accurate the information is, however, depends on the twitterer. Past experience quite emphatically shows the effects of erroneous messages, particularly on corporate stock prices.  

Let’s get back to our canary Tweety, who incidentally is blue on Twitter. Nowadays Tweety would send "tweets" and Sylvester, as a "follower," would read them. But what ever became of the elderly lady, who kept everything straight?