Feeling anti-social? Find friends fast

By Darren Gallagher

Despite promising signs beginning to appear in some sectors of our global economy, it's likely that for many organisations – cost control and better leveraging of human capital will continue to be critical for a considerable period of time. Less budgetary resource often creates greater innovation during times of competitive peer pressure since we all need to remain nimble, agile and responsive despite austerity measures.

“Information automatically harvested from email, wikis, blogs, micro blogs and forums provide a far more holistic solution to expertise transparency in the tacit knowledge world.”
-Darren Gallagher

One of the ways that organisations can differentiate themselves is through offering class-leading customer service. Business value can be clearly measured on the bottom line since the costs associated with customer acquisition and retention are driven down. But how do we begin to increase customer satisfaction and drive business value from these technologies?

Social search's impact on CRM

Many organisations are looking to increase first contact resolution rates through better leverage of the tacit knowledge within their workforce, regardless of whether they are full-time CRM agents in the contact centre or back-office workers in their homes or satellite offices. Social enterprise networking and unified communications (UC) can enable you to locate and contact the best resource to expedite the customer interaction to conclusion, either through the use of employee profile pages or automated expertise harvesting.

Be mindful that if your workforce are using externally hosted services, it may be difficult to securely connect, harvest and index the knowledge and innovation shared on such systems with your own Intranet search engines and therefore could effectively be lost to the organisation. It may be better to provide a platform internally where integration options are more controlled and intellectual property is protected, preserved and searchable.
 
Personal profile pages are an employee's mechanism for providing the corporate social network or directory with a freeform text description of their role, duties, skills, expertise and experience within the enterprise. However, there can be several drawbacks to the employee profile approach.

• Employees only enter what they believe to be pertinent to their current company and job role.
• Profiles tend to not capture the employees' full skill and experience profile.
• Profiles are very often not kept up-to-date.
• Employees rarely enter skills or interests in external subject matter.
• Employees do not disclose all expertise to 'avoid contact' which may seem to make them less productive in their current position.

Expertise harvesting

Information automatically harvested from email, wikis, blogs, micro blogs and forums provide a far more holistic solution to expertise transparency in the tacit knowledge world. It also provides greater insight in what the employees may be involved in outside of the work environment as well as within it, and many deliver powerful analytics back to the employees. They can see where they spend more of their time, who they communicate with the most, and what was discussed, enabling them to quickly identify further people who share the same interests and build better and more effective virtual teams.

This data can then be auto embedded and updated within profile pages (as tag clouds etc) as well as searched from the CRM solution and corporate intranet portal. What does this mean? Put simply, agents can find and collaborate with the right person first time that are most relevant to solving a customer problem, which decreases call time and improves customer relations. I think we are still some way from seeing totally automated skills-based routing of the back office but companies can now better understand the knowledge held within their human capital regardless of job title, department or geographical location - and be able to match their customers' inquiries more quickly to the right expertise.

Therefore, it's important when choosing a vendor to question how they are planning to leverage the expertise within your organisation and whether they are easily able to integrate and embed such functionality within social, UC and CRM applications.

Biography

Darren Gallagher is a Director within the Chief Technology Office at Siemens Enterprise. He has been involved in the design and implementation of several europe-wide VoIP and UC solutions and has held responsibility for technical relationships with system  integrators including IBM, Accenture, Cap Gemini, and Atos Origin. Gallagher is an active member of IEEE, UCIF and the SIP Forum.