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Thanks to the rise of social media, traditional channels of communications between companies and their customers — like e-mail and voice calls — are increasingly being replaced by feeds on Facebook and Twitter and this will have an impact on Indian call centre companies that service the customers of their international clients.
Speaking to Business Line from California, Mr Fergus Griffin, Vice-President, Service Cloud Product Marketing, salesforce.com, said that the way customers are responding to bad service is changing. “Today, people tweet if they get bad customer service, they don't call up to complain,” he noted.
As an example, he cited Mr Kevin Smith, an actor who was not allowed to fly on Southwest Airlines in February 2010 because there was only one seat and he was too fat to fit into it. When Mr Smith tweeted about this, his fan following was outraged and this soon snowballed into a big public relation problem for Southwest Airlines.
While this has not become common in India, Mr Griffin said that in the US many companies had started advertising on billboards and on TV asking people to visit their Facebook pages and not their Web sites. “Customer conversations are now happening openly on Facebook pages and Twitter and not on closed systems like e-mail and telephone calls and this is something that the Indian BPO industry, which has traditionally used mail and phone calls to offer customer service, should take note of,” he said.
In order to provide solutions to companies who want to find out what others are saying about them, salesforce.com on March 30 acquired a company called Radian6. This company has tools that allow companies to monitor what people are saying about them on publicly accessible areas of the Internet such as blogs, forums, Facebook and Twitter.
Mr Griffin declined to name any Indian company they was attempting to contact in order to sell them solutions that would enable them to monitor what people are commenting on them on social forums. The company already has clients such as Bajaj, Godrej, Dr Reddy's Laboratories and GVK in India.
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