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Voice-of-the-customer provider Qualtrics has released Social Connect, a sentiment analysis and social listening tool for contact centers.
Social Connect was born out of technology from Qualtrics’ $1.1 billion acquisition of Clarabridge, which closed in October. Qualtrics has evolved it since the acquisition, said Fabrice Martin, product lead at Qualtrics Customer Care. Social Connect brings together more than 30 popular social channels and messaging platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Viber, as well as live chat and email, in one dashboard to give contact center agents a single view of all the locations a customer may have used to reach a company.
Social Connect performs sentiment analysis in one-to-one conversations between an agent and a customer, assesses the difficulty customers have in solving a problem and also detects emotions expressed by the customer in words. Difficulty is a key metric, Martin said, because the more trouble customers have connecting with a company, the more likely they are to churn. Using AI to assess these issues can help shape the agent’s response.
Social Connect is also a social listening platform that monitors internet review sites, feeds like Twitter, and other places where a business might be publicly mentioned. Usually, social listening tools are the responsibility of the marketing team, used to understand the entirety of what has been said about a business. But that is changing.
“More and more of those conversations are becoming customer service conversations,” Martin said. “For example, some airlines use this on a day-to-day basis. What used to be social surveillance has become ‘I’ve lost my bag and I need someone to help me.’ There’s more contact, interaction and partnership between the marketing team and the contact center customer service team — because some of those requests are really customer service requests.”
According to Jim Davies, an analyst at Gartner, the general trend for voice-of-the-customer vendors like Qualtrics is to go beyond their traditional capabilities—capturing, analyzing, and presenting customer feedback—to add value to the organization.
“They are looking for opportunities to embed themselves more deeply in customer-centric operational departments like service, sales and marketing,” said Davies. “Due to their deep understanding of the customer experience, they are increasingly trying to intervene in customer processes – and even orchestrate them.”
Qualtrics released Social Connect features in conjunction with its X4 User Conferencing.
Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.
