If you think your company has customer service challenges, imagine how all the power and telecommunications companies in the areas affected by Hurricane Irene are feeling right about now. Their public relations challenges over how quickly — or not — they restore services is doubtless being compounded by all the comments posted about performance being posted on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn.
That’s why it isn’t surprising that many businesses are seriously exploring how to use social network concepts as part of their overall customer contact strategies. A report released this week by technology trends research firm Gartner suggests that the market for what it calls social customer relationship management (CRM) will reach more than $1 billion by the end of next year, which compares with $625 million for 2010. Gartner considers social CRM to be software and technologies that help companies build what it calls private-label community sites.
So, for example, a platform that would let your organization monitor and respond to customer service requests posted either in a private, gated community or on an independent social network such as the three that I already mentioned.
The biggest application for social CRM software, right now, is on business-to-business applications as opposed to those that facilitate business-to-consumer interactions.
Said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner:
“Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as a series of experiments and tactical purchases. Few have a social CRM strategy or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results. Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of applications for different purposes. This lack of consistency among buyers keeps the market fragmented into at least three segments — sales, marketing and customer service — with many small vendors taking various approaches to address one area, approach or use case.”
Yesterday, I personally spent about 40 minutes waiting on one telecommunications company’s contact center service because the problem I needed to report didn’t have a corresponding push-button response on its call-in system and I didn’t have any internet service. By the way, I was using a mobile phone that I didn’t have anywhere to charge. So you can imagine that I wasn’t thrilled with the process, but I didn’t really have a choice.
I’m sure many of you have had a similar experience, or been faced with a situation where the customer service function on a company’s web site was seemingly blind to any interactions that you might have had in the past via phone or (gasp) in person.
Businesses that spend the time to think about how social networks dovetail into their existing points of customer contact holistically are the ones that will earn positive customer feedback. I don’t personally like the social CRM phrase that has arisen to describe this sort of technology because it suggests that it IS something separate.
Over time, I think that will change as companies realized that social networks and private communities are simply part of smart customer relationship strategies that amplify the investment they have already made in customer contact or call-center solutions.
