HelpSocial and Genesys to Bridge the Digital Marketing Gap

Recently, HelpSocial announced their integration with Genesys PureCloud. They offer a useful set of features and benefits to the agents and leaders in a contact center, while the bigger picture of what they’re doing here is much bigger than bringing Twitter to a contact center. There is a gap between marketing and customer service and it has made it nearly impossible to realize true omnichannel experiences between traditional and digital marketing communication channels. The HelpSocial integration with Genesys solves this problem.

Marketing has historically “owned” social media and as the channel has grown, large brands have had trouble scaling their marketing team to address the volume if inbound social comments. Many would like to send the customer service-related activities to a customer service department, but they can’t. The issue is a technology problem – social marketing teams use tools built for their specific tactics and the contact center uses software designed for their processes. Neither of the two software stacks integrate together well (often, not at all) and this creates a gap between the two departments that usually leaves social customer service siloed outside the rest of customer service.

Imagine if a customer calls in with an urgent issue and for some reason, they reach the marketing department. The phone system in marketing is different than the phone system in customer service so the marketing person can’t transfer the call. And, not only can they not transfer the call, they can’t even tell the customer service department that the call ever came in or what it was about. At this point, if the person in marketing can’t help the customer, the only choice they have is to tell the customer to call back on a different phone number to speak with someone in customer service. When leaders need to make decisions later on, they pull all the reports but no one can fully understand what’s going on across the customer journey because the data doesn’t fit together.

Of course, this scenario is ridiculous. In 2018, we take for granted that we can transfer calls and forward emails and that the technology gaps in these channels were solved decades ago. But this is the reality with social customer service today. Most large brands have created additional processes to do their best at bridging this gap, but ultimately the service process is slower, inconsistent, expensive and much lower in quality than it should or could be. Talk to any leader about pulling data together to try and map out the customer journey from marketing to customer service and they might scream at you.

Worse, the gap makes it nearly impossible for a large brand to realize their vision of omnichannel experiences across communication channels and customer touch-points. No exaggeration, this gap has held back the industry in making omnichannel progress with digital transformation. The social media software companies have no interest in solving the problem – they’re doing well selling their stand-alone applications that keep social siloed. HelpSocial was never supposed to be a social media company. They experienced the gap problem first-hand when they were employees at Rackspace Hosting. Eventually, HelpSocial created their platform there to solve the problem and later spun out to start a company based on what was learned and has happened with their own customers.

In addition to bringing social media capabilities into the PureCloud interface, HelpSocial provides a complete social engagement dashboard for marketing teams to use and a completely open API where every feature and piece of data is exposed for custom use across the business. This means both teams can operate in social networks, from their own job-specific software, and stay in sync with each other, without stepping on each others toes. Social activities can be transferred from one place to another, just like a phone call. Data can be brought into centralized reporting services and/or fed into the different analytics dashboards of each department.

The best part is since all of this happens on one combined platform (Genesys + HelpSocial), omnichannel experiences can be realized across all business units and communication channels. For the first time, the customer journey can be tracked from the very first touchpoint of a marketing campaign to the most recent customer service experience after a sale has closed. If that’s not enough, eliminating the gap reduces the service cost, improves the quality of the experience and speeds up issue resolutions.

The opportunity in bridging the gap between marketing and the contact center isn’t just about giving an agent the ability to reply to a tweet from the contact center. It’s about helping brands to understand their customers better so they can create experiences that drive business outcomes that were impossible up until now. The team at HelpSocial is incredibly excited about the opportunity and looking forward to showing what’s possible with everyone at Genesys. Visit HelpSocial on the AppFoundry marketplace to learn more.

This post was co-authored by Matt Wilbanks. Matt is CEO and Co-Founder of HelpSocial, the #1 platform for integrating digital channels with the contact center. HelpSocial started as an internal project at Rackspace Hosting in 2010. Matt and Co-Founder, Robert Collazo, created the technology to help bring new social channels into the service systems used across the business. Together, with initial seed funding from Mark Cuban, Celebrity Shark Tank investor and Dallas Mavericks owner, they took the technology out of Rackspace and started HelpSocial in 2014.