Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Yammer… the list goes on. At last count, there were more than 200 mainstream social networks, ranging from microblogging to image-sharing and even an online hub for Catholic prayer.
Facebook crossed the billion active user mark last year, while 400 million tweets are posted across the globe each day. And as the digital landscape becomes increasingly social, businesses across all industries are being forced to evolve.
The outsourcing sector is no exception. Be it a call centre, an outsourced IT department or a bailiff-on-demand service, the majority of these firms now have a presence on each of the leading social networks. They respond to tweets on behalf of clients, engage their staff through internal networks or have products and services that now include a social dimension.
One outsourcing firm to arise from the primordial soup of digital to become a sentient social animal is Webhelp TSC. Founded in 1995, this contact centre business traditionally answered calls and emails for its clients. These days, the firm instantly responds to end-user queries on forums, webchats, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Increasingly companies from all industries are realising that the opportunities of social media are just too good to miss
“When we first started offering the social media services, people accused me of ‘eating my own breakfast’,” says Webhelp TSC’s chief executive David Turner. “But in order to stay in business, we had to make sure that we could talk to our clients’ end-users on whatever device and across whatever platform they wanted.”
Mr Turner’s call centre staff have now been trained up to be online “gurus”. The company gets under the skin of a new client, learns all about its products and services, and then hits the web. “It’s not that different to training a call centre agent,” he says. “You just have to understand what the customer wants.”
However, there are plenty of risks inherent for brands operating in this transparently social new world. “If you’re on the phone and you get a brand piece wrong, it’s one-on-one,” says Mr Turner. “If you get it wrong on Twitter, it’s on a public platform. That’s why you have to monitor sentiment very carefully – respond but never react. There’s a lot of forgiveness for brands who own up and fix their mistakes.”
Dominic Dryden, a partner at technology law firm Olswang, agrees. “Despite the inherent risks, increasingly companies from all industries are realising that the opportunities of social media are just too good to miss,” he says. “It is therefore crucial that companies identify the risks that are specific to them, set clear guidelines and develop a crisis plan so that they are ready to respond quickly should something go wrong.”
Malcolm Frank, chief strategist at NASDAQ-listed IT outsourcer and consultancy Cognizant, has direct experience of this. “The risks we’ve faced have mainly been cultural ones,” he says. “When we launched our social offering five years ago, a guy in Asia started talking about Osama bin Laden and said, contextually, that he could understand where much of Al-Qaeda’s anger came from. That did not go down well with our associates in New York.”
But Mr Frank says social media is still mandatory. “You have to trust people to be grown-ups. Will there be a few people who mess up? Of course, but they are relatively easy to spot and the risks are actually pretty small,” he says.
One entrepreneur using social media as a damage limitation tool is Jamie Waller, founder of outsourced bailiff service JBW Group. You would think that, as a bailiff firm undertaking contracts for local government, Mr Waller would give public social networks a wide berth. Not so. “If someone complains, we respond within eight minutes,” he says. “We ask them to DM [direct message] us and call them immediately, and then that person ends up saying nice things about us.”
This real-time customer service trail works wonders when Mr Waller comes to bid for new contracts. “It’s evidence of how well we’ll deal with their customers,” he says. Twitter has also proved to be a useful lead-generation tool for the firm. “You can go straight to the senior decision-maker,” Mr Waller explains.
Chris Barbin, chief executive of outsourced cloud broker Appirio, believes that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are ideal for customer retention in addition to acquisition and management. “If I look at my top ten CIO [chief information officer] relationships, I interact with four of the ten more on Facebook than I do on any other channel,” he says. “I don’t call or send an email, I send a Facebook message. And when he responds, he’ll have seen my holiday snaps and it’s all very social.”
There’s no doubt that the outsourcing industry is embracing social en masse, but it’s still a walled garden. Big blue chips will only work with outsourcers with proven form in the social realm. No one wants to risk a brand meltdown in public. As all too many firms have found to their cost, the internet never forgets.
