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.

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.

Gamu Nhengu

If you haven’t heard of Gamu Nhengu, you’ve either been out of the country, your TV is broken, or you don’t buy newspapers.

The story of the eliminated X Factor contestant has been everywhere – even making it into one of the major showbiz blogs in the US.

If you subscribe to the theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then Simon Cowell is playing a blinder. But there’s evidence that his brand is being badly damaged by the current controversy, which – like many major news stories these days – started on the social networking sites. One of your judges – Cheryl Cole – receiving death threats is not a happy state of affairs. A campaign on Facebook to have Gamu reinstated gathered more than 220,000 supporters in a matter of days. Some of the comments have now become racist and nasty, adding further tarnish to the whole sorry affair. Her audition for the show  is also one of the most popular clips on YouTube, with nearly 3 million views.

The effect, of course, has been to magnify an issue that has always been in the background – is the show fixed? My view, for what it’s worth, is that there will be further controversy ahead – something, perhaps, like last year’s battle for the Christmas No 1, which Simon Cowell lost thanks to a Facebook campaign.

The big lesson here is that the social media have changed the rules of the game forever. gem can help you manage the implications for your public image, whatever your business happens to be.

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.

But one of the world’s leading confectionery and food firms is discovering – after a five-month controversy – that life for a company on Facebook is not always sweet, and that you can make it infinitely worse by your own actions.

Let me take you back to March of this year, when Greenpeace supporters began to bombard Nestle’s Facebook page with entries demanding to know if the company was sourcing palm oil from endangered rainforests in Indonesia, where the orang-utan is under threat. Many of the writers used altered Nestle logos to make their point. An administrator on the Nestle page told them to, shall we say, take a break from using the firm’s trademarks. And then all hell broke loose. A few more snippy comments from the administrator, combined with the removal of some of the posts, and we had a perfect example of the Streisand Effect (named after the singer, who famously caused herself more trouble by trying to prevent publication of photographs of her house). The rule for the new media is that censorship doesn’t work. The only thing that does is creating something new to take the place of the offending material. Five months on, Nestle is doing that, but the damage has been done.

Dealing with the new media demands a new approach – like the one you’ll find at gem.

Within hours of the device going on sale, Twitter was alight with comments about yellow spots appearing on the screen and a much more serious issue – the fact that holding the phone in your left hand seemed to block the signal to the integrated antenna. I’m monitoring Twitter http://twitter.com/search?q=iphone%204 as I write this, and the comments are coming in at the rate of about 5,000 every 10 seconds. Not all are about the problems people have encountered, but the majority are. Buyers were also quick off the mark in posting videos of the problem on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmVpoccPnc&feature=related. Perhaps the most damaging commentary appeared on the Computerworld blog http://blogs.computerworld.com/16403/iphone_4_early_adopters_just_beta_testers_for_apple. 

All this activity soon turned it into a mainstream news story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8759590.stm. It even got the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg into trouble, after he forgot the power of his own site. www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/06/facebook-ceo-deletes-controversial-iphone-4-post.html. 

But you don’t have to launch the most eagerly awaited phone of the year to find your products or your reputation under attack. And as one blogger says, the web never forgets. You might as well carve the criticism in stone.

What if there happened to be a way of monitoring and responding to such negativity? There is. It’s called gem. And it’s one click away.

While in office, Dubya didn’t bother as much with online channels of communication as his successor, Barack Obama (check out his four million followers on Twitter). But he may have realised that if you want to promote an important cause like the Clinton/Bush Haiti Fund, (or even your wife’s book) then you need to choose the channel that gives you the most exposure.

It’s an implicit recognition that whether you happen to be in a charity, business or politics, the power now lies with the customer. He or she chooses the preferred method of communication.

As if to underline the point, BP has been fighting a rearguard action on the social media to answer its critics over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Check out the critics’ spoof BP account and the company’s response. The firm says it’s more interested in capping the leak than in online outreach. Maybe it’ll give it a higher priority as time – and the wave of social media coverage – goes on.

Incidentally, within hours of George W signing up to Facebook, he was facing criticism for getting someone else to write his posts.

The lesson: unless you’re part of the conversation, other people’s voices and views carry the day. Want to be part of it? Then why not start by chatting to us at gem?

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?