Automation tools are great for social businesses
Automation tools can crank through literally hundreds of thousands of posts per hour to find exactly what youre looking for. There are a few social automation tools on the market and I do know a number of companies that have coded their own business rules, but lets talk basics first
Automation tools are good at doing two things:
1) Identifying potentially "actionable"work.
When I say actionable I mean that its something your agents need to respond to - like a customer having a product or service issue or an inquiry about their account. Automating this kind of activity reduces the amount of triage that your team needs to do. (And lets be serious, who really want to be doing triage all day?)
2) Tagging social posts for more insightful reporting.
Automation tools are great at identifying everything from keywords (like your product names) to influencers (look for anyone with over 10,000 followers) to analysing sentiment. Once it recognizes the keywords or condition you outlined, it can add tags to the post which you can later report on.
Integration with a case management tool
Brands that are looking to make social just another service channel (i.e., universal agents) will likely have a requirement that the robot can automatically open a case in their case management system. This can be really handy if you have a dedicated support Twitter handle where pretty much every tweet you get is a support issue and you just want to automatically open a case for everything incoming.
Most automation tools are designed to integrate with a specific case management tool. So if youre looking to integrate with a different one, do your due diligence to understand the limitations of the API against your integration requirements document.
Sounds too good to be true! Is there a dark side?
As with any technology, there can be challenges in using it effectively. When I work with clients, we'll spend a significant amount of time up front defining the business rules that the automation tool will use. Through this planning process we can address two main issues.
Uncertainty around what primary use cases the automation tool will be used for or (worse) trying to get it to do things it isn't designed to do. You don't ask the dishwasher delivery person to also wash your clothes.
The business rules are badly written and the tool causes more problems than it solves. For example, if you tell the tool to open a case in your ticket management system every time it sees someone tweeting about your product, you;re going to get buried in cases pretty quickly.
My counsel is usually to have the tool help with the triage function so agents can spend more time engaging than processing. Automation tools are great at helping to identify what you are looking for on the social web, prioritizing, and routing so agents are working on the most important stuff first. Start with the basics and after a while you can try to get a little more fancy with it.
And there you have it. Automation tools are great for businesses that are trying to manage increasing volumes without proportionally adding headcount. Automation wont solve all your problems but with the right design and application, it can help you prioritize your work and provide more insightful reporting!
ARTICLE SOURCE: This factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that can be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.