Bryan O’Rourke just released an interesting article on the ramifications of Social CRM. He sites a report that was produced for Salesforces.com. He discusses the implications of new social technologies and how they can affect businesses that really understand how to use them, especially when it comes to providing support and customer service.
Some of the highlights of the study that stood out to me are:
- Expectations for social CRM (tapping into social networks to improve marketing, sales and service processes) will dramatically exceed the measurable benefits. (Isn’t that always true)
- For much of the world, Facebook will – or already has – become the dominant social networking site. Marketeers and customer service managers will need to take this into consideration when planning social networking projects, while monitoring for shifts in user sentiment.
(surprising how much of a hold it has made in such a short time, the question is who will be next?)
- Consumer willingness to perform all possible customer service functions themselves (self- service) will be universal by 2011. (That seems a bit of an overstatement to me)
Recommendations
- Customer service or customer experience should measure the consistency and effectiveness of customer interactions across all touchpoints from the customer’s point of view. (Sounds like something that should be a regular habit to me)
- The popularity of social networking sites means that the service organization cannot expect the customer to come to the corporate website only, but must work on ways to reach out to the customer at these destinations as well.
- When developing a long-term strategic road map for contact center infrastructure, include call recording as part of this single-vendor solution.
Source Article is here.