Vodacom South Africa Customer Service Goes Social with Genesys
Vodacom, the largest mobile communications provider in South Africa, will be deploying the Social Engagement application from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories to automate and integrate social media interactions with customers throughout its contact center and customer service operations. Vodacom is one of the first companies to deploy the Genesys Social Engagement solution.
Vodacom has been using the Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) platform to handle its more than 16 million calls per month. Blended e-services agents within the contact centers handle non-voice interactions, such as chat, SMS, Web call-back, and email. After experiencing major success with its social media presence, it determined it needed to more effectively handle the growing number of postings that required responses from the Vodacom customer support team. To date, it had been using a manual approach to handling social media queries.
Genesys Social Engagement lets Vodacom agents use existing routing, reporting, and agent desktop technologies to handle social media as part of a cross-channel customer service strategy built around driving customer conversations. Genesys Social Engagement supports Twitter and Facebook, which are Vodacom's primary social media channels.
The automated capabilities of the Genesys Social Engagement Platform make it easier for Vodacom to scale when customer interactions are heavy. It also allows customers and agents to seamlessly switch from one mode of contact to another; if an interaction begins on a social media channel, agents can offer Web call-back or email to deal directly with the customer, without losing context or data. Vodacom contact center agents use the same interface for social media interactions as they do for email, chat, and other support functions.
Vodacom worked with its partner, Dimension Data, in South Africa to define project requirements and implement Genesys Social Engagement within the Group.
Genesys Social Engagement analyzes social media interactions and applies intelligent customer routing and business rules to align interactions with the right resources in the contact center, marketing, or other groups. Integrated reporting is designed to deliver insight into business outcomes and effectiveness.
"With a corporate mission of making every customer smile, our goal is to be responsive. Ultimately, social media is just another channel for our customers to get hold of us," said Eben Dreyer, solution development manager at Vodacom, in a statement. "By integrating the Genesys Social Engagement solution within our existing Genesys system we can effectively handle the growing numbers of social media queries. A posting on a Web site may be only part of an interaction a customer may be having with us, so it is important that we have a highly integrated approach that allows us to uniformly handle all interactions."
"Social media has changed the way we interact with our colleagues, family, and friends, and it's now transforming customer service," said Paul Segre, president and CEO of Genesys. "Vodacom recognizes the value of delivering cross-channel customer conversation. We are pleased that they have chosen Genesys Social Engagement to help integrate their Facebook and Twitter channels into their overall customer experience."