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Gartner: Customer service perspective on social media

Despite the hype, the integration of social media client services companies still marginal. And also by the fact that Gartner which considers however that the situation will rapidly evolve in the next two years.

According to industry analyst firm, only 5% of organizations have now taken advantage of social networks and other collaborative tools to improve their customer service process. While the dedicated offers (infrastructure and software) are starting to grow and that awareness of the potential these new channels arrive at the highest levels of companies, are still most often the marketing departments that deal with social media, with a strategy of brand visibility.

Even so, users are taking advantage of every opportunity offered to them to make contact with their "suppliers": it is not uncommon to see requests for service or support to put "community managers "who manage accounts on Twitter or Facebook (or other) marketing, which often respond more quickly than conventional contact centers. This situation, except for now, risk push itself to the introduction of social media in the toolbox of customer service teams.

Although Gartner believes that 30% of companies have taken the plunge in the next 2 years, this adoption process is not easy . First, existing solutions are still young and have not been proven, are "automatically" set aside by the majority of organizations that are not at the forefront of innovation. In addition to these, current efforts often focus on process optimization and cost reduction, both of which do not facilitate the establishment of new solutions. Other major obstacle, the rapid transformation of the technological landscape (think SecondLife there are 2 or 3 years ...) casting doubts on the choice.

The first steps made by a few companies (also in France) are just sketches of what may become the "customer service 2.0. After the opening of new channels of support, typically operated by specific teams and independently of other channels, the next step is to fully integrate social media tools and customer service processes in order to improve the efficiency. Then comes the ultimate target when the first level of support will be provided by the community of users ("P2P"). Gartner predicts that 40% of the 1,000 largest companies reach this goal within 5 years. Optimistic?