Cloud CRM Software Forum

Are we Moving Toward Social Service—or just Social PR?

We'll be doing a big package of content on the topic of social media, cloud CRM, social CRM and service in the next 30 days or so. It's a fascinating field that is just in its infancy, but the ideas are very exciting. For example, we've all heard about companies monitoring Twitter and responding with fixes to problems quickly. We've all heard about customer communities, in which peers talk about products openly, and about the idea of companies participating in these communities (or starting them themselves). And we've all heard about the idea of taking the feedback of customers from any number of sources – direct contact from customers, blogs, Twitter posts, Facebook, etc. – and using it to fine-tune service processes.

Add to this the increasing demands of customers to contact companies through the channels they want to use—the phone has been augmented by e-mail and chat, for example—and the result is a fast-evolving landscape that's requiring service organizations to develop strategies on the fly.

That's a big task, which is why we're at the stage we're in right now, says Brent Leary, founder of CRM Essentials. "It's not really social service yet, but P.R. under the guise of social service," he said. "The classic case is the guy who's tried to get help through traditional channels, who's called his account executive with whom he's had a one-to-one relationship, and them gets frustrated and posts on Twitter about it. Suddenly in 30 minutes he has a response."

While that's great for the squeaky wheels out there, it's not the ideal service scenario. The fact that a Tweet gets more responses than appeals to what is supposed to be the service channel the company has designated for such issues indicates that those service processes are broken and need to be fixed. Applying a social CRM band-aid to a terminally-ill set of service processes is not going to get the job done.

You can see this concept in action with Frank Eliason, the well-known and quite accomplished director of digital care at Comcast. Frank and his team are all over social media, responding to complaints on all manner of social media. However, Comcast still lingers at the bottom in surveys of customer satisfaction, because as hard and as well as Frank's team does to reach customers who have taken complaints to social media, they don't yet represent a significant percentage of the company's customers. The remainder of those customers are subject to the company's service processes, and clearly their experiences with them are not proving satisfactory.

As Brent said, "the technology is ahead of the culture" in most companies. The winning companies will be the ones who adjust their cultures to the culture of the emerging social customer most effectively, and I'm convinced that much of that adjustment will involve the complete overhaul of service processes. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of a truly social service organization will be its ability to change its processes flexibly in response to the desires of customers.

That will be a much deeper change than can be accomplished by monitoring Twitter – but clearly there's a desire by many organizations to make meaningful changes. It will be exciting to watch.