3 Comments

  1. Sameer Patel August 12, 2009 at 9:28 am

    Great way to start a discussion on what is certainly on a lot of people’s minds. Open customer communications via social computing platforms such as Twitter have not only been effective in picking up on general customer service inefficiencies, It’s also been a very effective to show others how far you are willing to go to take care of your customers. Great way to not only support existing customers but impress prospects.

    Some look-before-you-leap considerations….
    Many larger companies are going to have trouble dealing with this “rogue” channel that’s not tied into their central BPM systems that you describe above. Examples of companies that have managed this are Dell and Comcast. However, they have designated people that know how to navigate the social web and the emerging rules of etiquette. Something that CSRs may need to be trained on or exposed to. Of course this is all changing rapidly. Smaller companies where everyone helps with everything are handling this very well already.

    In general companies need to think through what notification and interaction processes really benefit by being on Twitter vs. Email. The search interface is becoming a more common use of Twitter and does it make sense to keep posting messages that are irrelevant to the rest of the user base? Twitter is about adding value to others as well as the intended recipient. And some of these messages may be private (everyone doesn’t need to know that I’m late on my payment).

    Again, great post and I enjoyed reading your perspective.

  2. Jaisundar August 12, 2009 at 1:31 pm

    Absolutely agree with your comment on eliminating general inefficiencies using SM. I have encountered many service interaction situations of clients that seemed very tough to automate – especially when it came to the nitty gritty of dynamics in customer interaction. This new medium can so help in nicely tie up some loose ends and ease that problem out.

    Like you say it is very important to think through the whole SM plan and have a wholesome approach. Organizations cannot ignore the need to cross-train those using SM to interact externally – and there will be several overlaps across functions, for example between Marketing and Service, that become more apparant – great Customer experience being a joint responsibility of both marketing and sales.

    The single most interesting part though about SM according to me is that it can build that bridge between human activities and automated activies – that is to say, if used right, SM can allow you to automate parts of customer interaction activities without compromising the personal human side of these interactions.

    Perhaps that is really the key benefit we could expect from SM.
    .-= Jaisundar´s last blog ..BPM and Twitter – Tweeting to BPM =-.

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