Teleflora Scratches the Surface of the Social CRM Question: An Interview with Contact Center Futurist Amas Tenumah

Amas Tenumah, Vice President of Operations at Teleflora, is interested in social business strategy--how the company will begin to understand how to leverage collaborative technologies internally and externally. Some call this enterprise 2.0 or social CRM. Tenumah is asking the big questions which most of us in the contact center industry have failed to do. Teleflora is a perfect candidate for social CRM considering the Teleflora customer experience, products and preferred customer channel. Teleflora is an online floral retailer with a network of 18,000 B2B suppliers.

The internet retailer is generally a small to medium contact center except for four times a year when call volume put pressure on the center to expand the operation. The holidays that morph Teleflora's operation into a bigger animal include Mother’s Day, Valentines Day, Thanksgiving and X-Mas. These holidays bring their own set of opportunities and challenges for the Teleflora contact center team.

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To accommodate variation in demand Teleflora is looking to cloud based solutions which allow more flexibility, collaboration and easier access to customer data.

Many contact centers find themselves in the same situation as Teleflora. With customer demands increasing all eyes are on the contact center. And as an industry most contact centers have not addressed the social business strategy equation.

The company currently uses an on-premise solution which cannot always flex in the ways Teleflora needs it to.

Tenumah is in the beginning phases of developing a social technology strategy and, according to Tenumha, needs a solution that can intelligently lump in twitter, Facebook and other social channels in addition to the old school channels (phone, voice, email and chat) for one consolidated CRM. A hybrid shop, Teleflora has legacy systems, knowledge management challenges and stovepiping—raw intelligence or data served up without proper context. But most contact centers are currently in this boat. Aside from the technology, the contact center is about people, processes and technology, and will always be. But it's time to up the ante.

Tune in to this podcast to get a sneak peak of Tenumah’s case study the International Contact Center Expo & Conference in Miami, Florida October 25-27th, 2010.