Wayne Gretzky, one of the greatest professional hockey players in the history of the NHL once said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” In a fast moving sport, the athlete who can read the action well enough to anticipate where the play is going to be and get there first will have the edge over other players. This is what “The Great One” demonstrated when he played the game.
Right now, there is a lot of action in the contact center space. Do you know where the play is going to be next?
In the April 2010 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions published by TMC, Rich Tehrani unveiled the results of a survey of contact centers regarding their approach to social networking. The results are interesting. Although a majority (69% to be exact) of those surveyed say that they monitor some sort of social media and alerts, less than half of the contact center agents are trained on how to deal with social media. Most of the contact centers deal with blogs, Twitter, forums, and Facebook as the social media channels they are handling.
Most of us know that social media is out there and that we need to deal with it; that is where the puck is right now. Very soon we are going to see the gap grow between good contact centers and great contact centers based on how they deal with the social media puck. Training your agents to deal with social media now is a demonstration of “playing where the puck is going to be.” Go team!
