Bridging the Gap between Social CRM and the Enterprise
by Tim Dreyer on April 23rd, 2012
Any casual observer can see the impact social media has had on the way we as consumers create, retrieve, and share information in our day-to-day lives. Companies enthusiastically jumped into social media to use it as a marketing channel while consumers have just as enthusiastically engaged those same companies (and legions of fellow consumers) to make known product or service issues or questions they want addressed.
For example, look at a recent U.K. study of social media customer service published last month by Sitel and TNS. It found that more and more consumers are using social media to get
information or resolve issues with companies. The study shows changing behavior as people are adopting a “tweet first” approach when looking to get information from — or resolve an issue with — a company. In fact, 17 percent of the Gen Y segment responded by saying companies should improve response time when a query is posed on Twitter.
Predictably, service-minded organizations are turning to common ground by building or expanding their presence on social outlets like Twitter and Facebook. Initially, these moves were more reactive than proactive as a way to stem negative, brand-damaging posts from going viral. But as customer engagement begins to deepen on social platforms, companies are seeing the benefits of a proactive social-service model. They are adapting a more collaborative approach, allowing their customers to play a part in shaping and managing their own customer-company relationship.
Just employing social CRM is not what makes a social business, however. Weaving social ideas and practices into every part of a company’s operations internally as well as externally is what classifies a business as truly social.
From customer service agents to IT to finance and beyond, every person within an organization is an integral part of making a business social and, for that matter, making a business successful. Removing the silos and replacing them with an enterprise philosophy that promotes collaboration will bring all that is good about social CRM home to the (social) enterprise. This collaboration-powered enterprise allows for expertise and knowledge to be shared and socialized across any and all departments – all of which ultimately translates to an enriched customer experience. It also means delivering much sought-after answers to those consumers’ questions and issues we talked about earlier. So, we have come full circle here.
All of this reinforces our view of next generation customer contact – that is, always looking for ways to bring people (within and outside the enterprise) and information together to improve the customer experience in ways not previously possible. It removes communication and workflow bottlenecks and produces smarter, more efficient business processes and ultimately, more profitable customer interactions.
Hi Derek
We’ll escalate this and make sure you get some assistance ASAP. You can email me directly at tim.dreyer@aspect.com or call me at 630-227-8312.
Tim Dreyer
Jim,
I’m Sr Manager of Central Technology at Yahoo! and a Epro 5.2 customer. Don’t have your email so thought you could see my inquiry this way. We’re implementing UIP 7.0 here at Yahoo! and there are numerous show stopping bugs that your support hasn’t been able to fix, seriously jeopardizing our rollout. The project has already been delayed for one month and if there are no immediate fix to the show stoppers we’ll have to terminate this project. Hope you or an Aspect executive see this message and offer us assistance to move forward.
Very Unhappy Customer,
Derek Hou
Great article! We being an outsourcer use social media to follow and keep uptodate with market trends more than customer engagement and find it very helpful!
Social media is massive for most of our cleints – http://www.bellcomworldwide.com/clients.aspx and so we need to keep up to date!