Social customer service software and services provider LiveWorld today launched the Conversation Management Platform, a cloud-based solution to help companies manage customer conversations across social media and messaging apps in real time.
The new software combines analytics, semantic and sentiment analysis, and customer targeting for smart conversation detection, which can be configured to specific business structures, such as stores, regions, brands, or products. One-on-one conversations are processed through a case management framework, which is optimized for social media and messaging apps.
In addition, the Conversation Management Platform provides users with more customer knowledge through profiles, conversation histories, and CRM platform integration.
"Consumers on social media live in a conversational environment," says Peter Friedman, chairman and CEO of LiveWorld. "The agent needs to see the whole conversation, with all the context and history."
According to Friedman, the Conversation Management Platform provides companies with all they need to "sort, triage, prioritize, manage, and engage with customers on social."
With it, users can do the following:
- seamlessly transition conversations from public to private on Facebook and Twitter;
- identify and prioritize customer service inquires and loyalty marketing opportunities;
- blend public social data with customer information to create more robust profiles;
- notify teams of new conversations, encouraging prompt replies and enforcing service-level agreements;
- enhance data and discover insights through human and automated tagging; and
- leverage conversations across the enterprise by integrating with CRM and help desk applications.
The application currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, and a number of other social media platforms, as well as the new Facebook Messenger chat platform.
LiveWorld has deployed the application with a number of clients using Salesforce.com, but Friedman says the Conversation Management Platform's open application programming interface (API) will enable it to work with any other systems.
It is already deployed across thousands of social pages and acts on hundreds of thousands of user comments per month for some of the top companies in the retail, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceutical, travel, and financial services industries.
The application uses automation "to identify, organize, and prioritize conversations and then passes them on to human agents to respond," Friedman says. "We're not replacing humans with technology. We're making them more knowledgeable and responsive."
This human element is critical to companies' success on social media, according to Friedman. "Social media is conversational. It's personal. It has to be personal, and only a human can do that," he says. "The humans actually engage with customers, and now they can turn up the empathy in the proper context."
"Conquering conversational management requires solving scale and speed issues, while also empowering agents to be more knowledgeable in their interactions," said Frank Chevallier, LiveWorld's vice president of products, in a statement. "This software enables brands to make informed decisions about when, where, and how to engage customers and then operationalize those conversations across organizations and internal systems."
For LiveWorld, the release of the Conversation Management Platform comes as Friedman has made the bold prediction that most customer service conversations will move to social media within the next few years, mainly because customers prefer it and for companies, it's much more cost-effective as a support channel than the phone.
"Consumers are increasingly turning to social media as a support channel," he states. "Consumers like it better, and companies are starting to like it better too."