Social media is a powerful tool for connecting people across the globe. Now more than ever, consumers are reaching out to businesses through public social media instead of using traditional service channels, such as phone, text or web chat. This is especially true in the Middle East and Asia.

The challenge for many organizations is that their customer experience (CX) departments aren’t set up to scale this type of engagement. And that’s creating missed opportunities to build relationships with customers and prospects and connect data from across every touchpoint.

Consumers, particularly digital natives, continue to introduce new preferences for how they want to interact with businesses. Instead of dialing customer service directly, they often choose to reach out to businesses via public social media channels like X or WhatsApp — and they expect a response. Whether it’s posting a complaint, asking for help or searching for information on a product, consumers don’t mind the public knowing what they have to say to — and about — a brand.

For many businesses, public social media channels are managed outside the contact center. Often, this ownership is part of a company’s marketing department. And the social media strategists that run these channels are charged with amplifying company news, monitoring conversations, and analyzing their brands’ awareness and performance in the market. They’re not focused on providing great customer service — and they’re disconnected from other teams that are.

Further compounding the problem, most organizations rely on point solutions to manage their social media presence; these solutions aren’t integrated with their customer engagement systems and departments. They don’t have the customer experience infrastructure to use social media as an effective service channel today.

For organizations to stay ahead and meet customers where they are, that needs to change. They need to provide proactive, connected service through public social media channels.

From a digital communications perspective, Middle East consumers’ adoption of public social media channels is a bit ahead of Europe, North America and other regions in the world. We’re anticipating other markets will accelerate their use in the near future.

Interact with Customers in the Channels That Matter

Instead of looking at social media as a tool for marketing, businesses need to expand their view. They need to see it as an important channel to engage and connect with their customers and prospects. And they need to realize it’s a crucial and largely untapped opportunity to glean valuable customer data and business insights.

Companies of all sizes and geographies need to start thinking about how to integrate social media channels into their end-to-end customer experience strategy. This will require them to:

  • Evaluate where their existing and potential customers are now and be prepared to meet them with proactive conversations versus one-way engagements
  • Empower service teams with the tools and resources to effectively use this channel
  • Connect the rich data and insights available on public social media channels with other service channels so they deliver contextual, proactive customer experiences — anywhere their customers are

To differentiate today, organizations need to orchestrate seamless experiences across all channels and deliver contextual engagement to customers no matter whether they interact with a brand. Many call this a channel-less experience. It’s the notion that, as a consumer, whatever the channel you use, you should have the same experience.

Omnichannel, which is often siloed, is about offering all the channels — without necessarily creating connected, consistent experiences across them. With a channel-less experience, you can start a conversation on WhatsApp and finish on the phone. And customer context carries it from one conversation and channel to the next — whether assisted by a person or a bot.

This road to a channel-less future includes public social media.

Deepen Your Customer Understanding with Public Social Media

In the digital economy, it’s imperative for many businesses to expand their use of social media channels to connect with an evolving customer base. To help businesses accomplish this, Genesys acquired Radarr Technologies, a cutting-edge, born-in-the-cloud AI-based social and digital listening, analytics, and consumer engagement company. Businesses today use the Radarr platform to make decisions from social media and digital conversations in real time using data visualizations, dashboards and insights reporting.

To enable organizations to better connect the end-to-end customer journey, we’ll bring the public social media capabilities of Radarr into our AI-powered experience orchestration platform. When combined with the Genesys Cloud™ platform’s voice and digital offerings, including our existing private social media messaging solutions, organizations will have unmatched capabilities to listen to their customers on these channels and turn these inquiries into loyalty-building conversations.

The integration of Radarr Technologies capabilities with Genesys Cloud will be a game changer that:

  • Helps organizations further connect their customers’ attitudinal, sentiment and interaction data across the CX continuum by tapping into social media insights as a critical source for our 360-degree customer view fueling Genesys AI.
  • Gives organizations direct access to new conversation streams from public social media posts across multiple platforms, including Apple App Store, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Google Play, Google My Business and more.
  • Enables organizations to better understand and serve their customers by using the differentiated AI-powered Multilingual Sentiment Models of Radarr to enhance our own natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Radarr comes to Genesys with additional NLP across more than 100 languages and dialects. Bringing its capabilities into the Genesys portfolio will help us expand the ability for organizations to detect their customers’ regional slang and colloquialisms across languages and dialects.

Organizations will be further positioned to unify and personalize the customer experience by combining the capabilities of Radarr with Genesys Cloud. Through this connection of insights across traditional service channels and public social media feeds, Genesys will enhance the power of experience orchestration to enable businesses to deliver rich contextual engagement that drives customer loyalty and differentiation.

In advance of native integration for Genesys Cloud, organizations can begin accessing capabilities from Radarr through an integration offered in the Genesys AppFoundry® Marketplace, expected during the first quarter of 2024 with limited regional availability.

To learn more and schedule a demo, visit Radarr on the Genesys AppFoundry.