the gem blog

The impending changes in gambling regulations throughout Europe will bring about many challenges forcompanies in this sector. Many companies now have an in-country online presence and there are projections that the value of this activity will increase in value across Europe by 2015.

These changes will present many opportunities and challenges for these companies, including the requirement to offer an outstanding customer experience in your customers’ native language.
Listed as a Gartner cool vendor, gem is an outsource contact centre headquartered in Belfast. We provide pan-European multi-channel support to a number of global gaming and e-gaming companies in 31 European languages from our sites in Belfast and Hungary.

At gem we work with our clients to adapt their contact strategy to meet the needs of their customers. From traditional channels such as voice and email to chat and social media channels, gem’s agents successfully handle simple and complex enquiries across multiple channels and languages, moderate contacts via community forums and blogs and monitor topics on micro-media sites to provide a true “voice of the customer”.

To learn more about how gem can help you build your contact strategy contact fiona.pelissier@the-gem.com

On the 21^st of January 2011, Sian Massey was one of a small number of women referees in English football. Two days later, she was one of the most famous faces in Britain and in sports circles around the world, thanks to the Andy Gray and Richard Keys sexism row.

This is not the place to debate the rights or wrongs of what was said or what was done in response, but it’s a graphic example of how reputations and brand perception can be altered in minutes online – and how the web can transform the most local of issues into something much more massive.

Four separate clips of Gray and Keys’ unguarded remarks have now turned up on YouTube.  The reaction dominated the domestic news agenda for a week and reached the pages of eminent journals like the Washington Post.

It even made it on to the front of t-shirts.

After the clips went viral, it was almost inevitable that two jobs would be lost and Sky Sports would suffer some collateral damage. The channel started the week having to demonstrate a hard line on the issue and ended it being accused of failing to investigate how the audio and video material leaked out.

The trouble with the social media is that it’s so easy to lose control of the debate – unless you have experts on your side. These outlets are increasingly the battleground on which reputations are made and lost. And who wants defeat when you can have a score draw or a win?

Contact us to find out how we could help you avoid being caught offside.

You may think that if you keep in touch with your customers regularly by email or text, you’re using the most cutting edge communication tools available to humankind. But it’s time to think again.

Research by analysts Nielsen shows that 40 per cent of US online time is now spent on just three activities – social networking, gaming and emailing, with social networking way out in front.

Gartner goes a step further, predicting that 20 per cent of workers will use social networks as their primary method of business communication by 2014.

In fact, the government of British Columbia in Canada has recently given public employees the green light to use Facebook and Twitter to communicate with citizens.

So what does all this tell us?

Well, one clear message is that if you ignore social media and gaming as channels of communication, then you’re missing out on a potentially huge audience. Okay, so the Nielsen research applies to America. But even if you have no customers there, it’s worth remembering that every online trend that starts in the US arrives here before long.

I’m not saying that email is unimportant. I’m just highlighting the fact that we live in a world where the customer chooses the method of communication and you need to keep every angle covered – as Ben & Jerry’s discovered when they shifted their focus away from email.

Luckily, at gem we’re experts in every flavour of communication – in multiple languages. For a taste of what we do, take a look at how we’ve already helped companies connect with their customers.

It’s remarkable that there are still some people who believe that a damaging mention of their brand on Twitter will eventually evaporate into the ether. After all, social media sites and their users have the attention span of a gnat, right?

Wrong. The BBC is only one of many outlets telling its journalists to monitor the social media for news stories.

Those who have fallen foul of the mainstream media’s new interest in what’s being said online include the England cricketer Kevin Pietersen, who was forced to apologise after a tirade on Twitter about being dropped from the squad  was picked up by the newspapers. Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant whose temper tantrum has spawned a cottage industry on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, caused all sorts of problems for the airline in more traditional outlets. Even Sky Sports has fallen foul of the trend, after the papers discovered that one of its presenters was posting suggestive tweets on Twitter. The television channel was forced to take action over what it believed was damage to its reputation. The most recent example is the controversy surrounding the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.    

The lesson from all of this? The social media sites no longer exist in isolation from the mainstream media, and old methods of crisis management are dead in the water. You need to stop the problem as soon as it starts, and that’s where gem can help.

When the history of the 2010 general election comes to be written, Gordon’s gaffe in Rochdale may not figure as prominently as the final outcome.

But everyone in the business world should take note: make a twit of yourself with a few badly-chosen words, and these days Twitter will look after everything else that’s needed to damage your brand.

BBC Northern Ireland presenter Wendy Austin told listeners that news of Mr Brown’s “careless whisper” was doing the rounds in Holland just 30 minutes after it happened. If you’re trying to protect a brand reputation, that’s a scary thought.

Within 24 hours, there were several hundred video clips on YouTube, including a mash-up that set the offending words to a rap music track. And the ridicule has continued ever since.

These days, information travels at the speed of light. Worse still, it doesn’t have to be true to make an impact.

Whatever your brand happens to be, all it takes is one disgruntled customer to start an avalanche that can bury it.

Keeping tabs on all the chatter can be difficult, but at gem we have some unique online tools that can do the job for you. The bottom line is, if you don’t control the message, someone else will.

If you need proof of that, look no further than one of the most infamous examples of brand damage in recent years.

Two employees of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant in the US filmed themselves doing unspeakable things to the food. But that was merely the match that started the fire. The social media added the fuel to turn it into an inferno. The damage wasn’t resolved until the company responded using the same channels – Twitter and YouTube – to talk to its customers in an authentic and sincere way.

Talking to us at gem is a lot easier.

At our last management meeting I broke a plank of wood in two.   First time, no hesitation – I was strong, I was tough, I was focused.  Don’t mess with me!

I should explain that this was not a random act of violence on my part (as if!) but a planned activity to inspire team ability and demonstrate how focus and belief can deliver results.   

Having focus is important.  It is all too easy in any business to lose focus as there is so much to do and so little time etc.    One of the ways that we at gem maintain focus on issues of importance for our clients is through the use of cross-functional teams who are collectively tasked with business improvement and identifying and implementing best practice across all our clients.  Account Plans are created for all clients and areas of improvement and innovation continuously identified.   These plans are reviewed at senior management team and results carefully monitored. 

Recently this has included implementing new social media strategies, reducing customer contacts through improved First Contact Resolution and smart self-service strategies, introducing community moderation as a primary support model, creating a web reporting portal that provides our clients with real-time flexible reporting and analysing voice of the customer data among thousands of online comments.   

We even make these teams break planks of wood to demonstrate their focus.  A couple of months ago we fire-walked;  some months before that the team abseiled down the largest hotel in town, who knows what our CEO has planned in the next couple of months – cross-channel team relay swimming, anyone?

I live in the coldest place in Northern Ireland.  Officially.  The weather station positioned at Katesbridge, a few miles from my house, consistently records the lowest temperatures in the North – –12°C was recorded in recent days.   And, of course, living up a hill near the Mourne Mountains, accompanying these low temperatures are horrendously bad road conditions.  Getting up our driveway requires climbing equipment, going outside requires so many hats, gloves, coats, scarves and welly boots for the kids and myself that I’ve almost lost the will to live by the time we are ready to leave the house.  We have been able to sledge down the hill in front of us in recent days and yesterday I crashed the car into a ditch (well, actually, I did everything possible not to go into the ditch but the car refused to respond to any commands – loud verbal or otherwise).  

Despite the bad roads in my area, I choose to live in a remote part of the country and don’t expect the gritters to come right to my door.   However, I do expect them to clear the main roads that I need to travel to get the kids to school and myself to work and that hasn’t always happened.  There are a host of reasons provided – lack of machines, lack of salt, exhausted staff, the duration and severity of the cold spell etc – but I can’t help thinking every time I hear another excuse that this is just bad planning.

And this is not acceptable – we deserve better.  And I feel justified in demanding that because I know that in my professional life, gem delivers better.  gem manages a number of accounts that experience pronounced seasonal fluctuations in volume from the travel, technology, telecoms, retail and media industries.  We create surge management strategies for a number of scenarios for all our clients – in some cases, strategies can be activated within minutes, others within 24 hours.  We expect the unreasonable, we plan for the unexpected and we prioritise for the important contacts.

This might mean that we need to monitor community forums for our technology clients to identify and proactively address any emerging issues for our clients.  It might mean liaising with the operations sides of our telecoms clients to ensure that we understand any problems in the field and disseminate them immediately to their customers.

A good example, we have unfortunately encountered multiple times in the last few years, are security crisis affecting our travel clients which cause us to be both very reactive (handling excess inbound contacts) and also very proactive in dealing with the consequences (making outbound contacts to affected customers, IVR messaging, community forum updates) – manning 24 hour desks, using skill-based routing to direct complex enquiries, setting up triage services, making use of multi-channel communications to minimise handling times and extend our communications reach, using staff that we have previously trained for just such an emergency – in many cases getting all these methods active within 24 hours of the crisis starting.  Our responses then get better over time, not worse.  

We also monitor news sites etc to anticipate any potential problems affecting our customers and immediately start working on managing anticipated surges in volumes – we don’t wait until the cars hit the ditches!

www.the-gem.com