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Location Based Services (LBS) are becoming all the rage now. Start up companies like Foursquare which is a web based check in service where you can declare your location to your friends, and even popular sites like Twitter and Facebook are getting into the act and attaching location based information about your status updates.
Clearly people are becoming more comfortable and seeing reasons to allow location based information to be used. But what does this mean to your company?
I believe every single company will need to understand the power of location. And marketing need to get used to thinking location + business can equal big money.
Let’s take the combination of Twitter and location as an example. Comcast provides customer care through its Twitter account “comcastcares”. They use their twitter account to provide customer support if their cable, internet or phone service is out. And it’s become a critical piece of their support organization getting 5,000 – 8,000 tweets per week. They have a team headed by Frank Eliason, the man behind the comcastcares twitter handle with 10 people level 2 and level 3 support people working with him.
Now that Avaya has developed our Social Media Manager solution (get our new book on this) to help folks like Frank to automate what he and his team currently does which is reading tweets and other social data to find support related items. So they can begin to focus elsewhere.
Now that we have all the data about these support related tweets in our system – what if we map where complaints are coming from? Then we can easily visualize using some form of a mashup – where the company should invest in improving its infrastructure and hence their reputation.
This is really a natural extension of the next generation contact center that uses social media to provide superior customer service. We have learned a lot about how social will impact the contact center over the past few years. And I can promise you this is only just the beginning of the age of Social Customer Service.
