Summer 2009

Imagine a world where a consumer logs on to a social networking web site to grumble online about bad experience with a product that you supplied, and your contact centre software automatically discovers the posting, alerts your customer service team and initiates a response process.

It's not happening yet, but according to consultancy Datamonitor, it soon might. The organisation reckons there's an opportunity beckoning for software that can recognise these online events and handle 'some or all of the interactions' involved.

Datamonitor says this need has arisen because social networking sites have grown so rapidly in significance. It says that so far, the commercial world has limited its involvement with them to sales and marketing initiatives, but that support services could follow.

Individuals are constructing elaborate online social networks that in many cases are significantly broader than their real-world equivalents, according to a report entitled The Rise of Social Networking and Emerging Channels in Customer Service.

 

It continues: 'If, for example, a customer complains to the world at large about poor service, the company being complained about proactively reaches out to the customer to try to solve the issue.'

However, the report continues, 'this model cannot scale to meet the exponential growth which online social networking services are experiencing.' Hence the opportunity for customer interaction technology providers to create solutions that provide scalability for these support operations.

Datamonitor admits there numerous technological, business process and cultural hurdles to overcome before this model can gain a strong foothold in the enterprise market, but says that companies failing to address the challenge will fall behind in competitiveness.