Over the last few years, social media has gradually achieved a small, but highly significant place within customer care and sales channels. CMS providers jumped to provide solutions as early as 2010-2011, but not until recently have these solutions reached a maturity level that has enabled them to go beyond simple monitoring of comments, posts and tweets.

Aegis developed its proprietary social monitoring and engagement tool AegisLISA in 2012 through the company’s Innovation lab. LISA stands for Listen, Interact, Socialize and Adapt, and the company claims it does all four. The tool is a bundle of web-hosted, cloud-based social offerings, including analytics and campaign management, plus support from Aegis’ social media and analytics specialists, and is also offered as a PaaS. To date, AegisLISA has been rolled out, in full or in part, to 23 clients.

AegisLISA includes a monitoring platform that tracks online social conversations and allows agents to interact, perform perception mapping, create user personae, identify influencers, and classify topics. The platform looks at the major social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr, plus 160 million forums, communities, news and review sites, and blogs. But as standard practice, clients focus on specific channels relevant to their business. Based on keywords, the platform analyzes sentiments, classifies interactions, and performs skill-based and availability routing automatically. Offering a single view to the agents, the platform queues interactions coming from the various channels and prioritizes the tickets.

Aegis has implemented a two-tier resolutions team, where Front End agents respond on the same channel used by the customers, and if a problem requires escalation, a Back End team communicates with the client, updates the Front End team, and closes loops with the customer. All these workflows are automated and allow standard response templates to be configured to assist the agents.

The analytics dashboard presents a granular data overview, brand and topic analysis, and social insights into customer behavior. Clients use the information to prioritize queues and add keywords, but often, due to clutter, clients are identifying what to remove from keywords libraries, tracked sentiments, and data points.

The platform has multilingual support and interface customization with the option to integrate into third party CRMs. AegisLISA has been customized in 12 languages and is implemented to support major European and South East Asian languages, and also Arabic, Hindi and multiple Indian languages and dialects.

AegisLISA was implemented with an Indian telecom provider, for which Aegis has 60 full-time social media representatives dedicated to engaging and providing resolution to customers. The 24/7 service aims not only to respond to queries, complaints and requests, but to make social the preferred channel for communication and potentially reduce call traffic. Since 2011, Aegis’ team in Gurgaon, India, monitors and interacts with customers over Facebook and Twitter and 114 other sites in multiple languages under a 15 minute turn-around SLA. Every comment/tweet/post is extracted by AegisLISA and tagged with predefined labels feeding the social team with problems to respond to or escalate to the telecom’s internal departments. The collected data is used by the client to address service issues and improve offerings. Today the team runs its overall resolution time at less than 6 hours for 70% of complaints.

Aegis has had a partnership with a global auto manufacturer since 2009 and currently has 40 FTEs supporting the client. In May 2012, Aegis began supporting the India social media channel for the client, offering online monitoring and engagement on a nine hours, seven day operational window. AegisLISA gathers data across multiple sites, RSS feeds, and crawler results based on keywords and tags, and presents it to the client’s marketing department to answer online, but also to help them better understand the customer behavior.

AegisLISA is one of the company’s key offerings and Aegis relies on it to extend and deepen its client engagements, providing a more holistic social media approach. Aegis also plans to use it as a vehicle to enter new markets (e.g. into Spanish-speaking countries with its latest language addition).