Customer support has always been a challenging task for companies, especially when customer volumes and product SKUs increase. As social media becomes increasingly pervasive, how can companies make their support systems more responsive?

Firms including Cisco and Zendesk have developed systems that integrate customer communications functions with social media such as Twitter. Zendesk has a support ticketing system that can turn Twitter posts into support tickets. This integration makes it relatively easy to respond to Twitter posts from customers complaining about a service, while also registering the whole incident in the support system.

Such developments are becoming increasingly relevant as customers choose social media channels to complain about bad experiences with companies. Support desks can no longer expect customers to come directly and privately to them any more, but must monitor Twitter and other social media for information about bad customer experiences.

The new generation of customer support systems feature innovations such as collaborative authoring, in which multiple parties can contribute to a help ticket, which then becomes a searchable part of a database. Support feedback mechanisms are becoming multichannel, and socially enabled, which allows content to be personalized more effectively.

Rather than simply being a means of solving an irritating problem, then, support is becoming a more integrated part of the customer experience. Customers should be able to leave support interactions more satisfied as a result, and this is a key deliverable. Support incidents are pivotal points in the customer relationship, in which individuals can come away from a company feeling looked after, and valued, by their supplier. These incidents are an opportunity to not only recover relationships, but also to enhance them, and perhaps even increase revenues by cross-selling.

This blog first appeared on Orange Business Live we contribute to regularly.

Generally these days, when we think of virtualisation, we think of it in the context of IT infrastructure. But the notion of virtualisation goes far beyond servers and storage, and has profound cultural and economic ramifications. We’re becoming increasingly disassociated from our physical environments, and in many cases, I don’t think we realise it.

The symptoms of this disassociation can be very explicit. Most recently, two Korean parents were sentenced after letting their baby daughter starve to death while they busied themselves playing online games. They neglected the real world, while immersing themselves in a virtual one.

Most discussions of those who live too much online focus on the obvious issues: gaming addition, a preoccupation with cybersex, or an unhealthy obsession with Facebook. It’s easy to point out that many of us speak to more people on Facebook in a day than we speak to in real life. All of these are well-made points, but they’re only part of a broader issue.

The pervasive nature of virtualisation also affects our economy and society in broader ways. Our supply chains are so virtual that we can switch suppliers thousands of milles away in an instant. The virtualisation of our housing by interpreting it in terms of credit default swaps led us to forget how much they were really worth, and when someone realised that, it tanked the economy.

Tech can bring us wonderful benefits. It enables me to speak to my children and see and hear them, even when I am in a different city. I can pick the brains of a large community of extremely smart people, without leaving my chair. And every time I turn on my Mac, I’m bathed in new ideas. It’s the most intellectually stimulating place on the planet.

But in acknowledging all that, we must also acknowledge the downsides. Virtualisation involves the abstraction of the logical from the physical. In that sense, it naturally tends to alienate us from our physical environments, and with that, comes a sense that we have forgotten how to live in the moment. I worry that younger generations in particular, as plugged-in as they are, will lose this.

Eventually I think the pendulum will swing back to a point where we rediscover the value of the physical. But in the meantime, I hope that in the meantime, an over-reliance on technology at the expense of engagement with our environment won’t leave us spiritually bankrupt.

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So how did social media fare in 2009, and what can we look forward to in 2010? If Facebook could be considered a bell-weather for social media, then 2009 was an important year, because it broke through 300 million users and became cash-flow positive for the first time. Although this of course doesn’t mean that it is profitable – yet.

Analyst Gartner reckons that Facebook will actually strengthen its position in the future, because it will help different social networks operate with mechanisms such as Facebook Connect. In fact, Gartner believes that interoperability will be the most important trend in social networks over the next two years.

All business sectors embraced social media in 2009. Look at newspapers; criticised by Gartner in early 2009, the vast majority of newspaper sites now have social media widgets to help their readers share information. The Telegraph, for example, has a ‘retweet’ button, which handily counts the number of times readers have retweeted its articles.

Away from the mainstream, social media turned up in all sorts of places. It aimed to stop the spread of swine flu, got jurors into trouble in court and even saw an innocent man hauled down the police station to be questioned about terrorism offenses.

So what for next year? Well Forrester’s Josh Bernoff believes that 2010 is the year when marketers will focus less on fuzzy social media metrics and look for proper measureable marketing metrics. Getting followers and friends is all very well, but if businesses don’t use these networks or connections for any obvious end, then the money is wasted. In fact it can be counterproductive if the connections get bored or disillusioned with the enterprise’s business.

What do you think?

Here’s an extract of an article that Simon Marshall and myself wrote last week for Orange Business Services on their Orange Business Live blog…..

Social networking usage in the workplace has gone through the roof as Generation Y employees tap into social media such as Instant Messaging, Twitter, Facebook, SharePoint and WordPress to interact with colleagues, partners and customers. As enterprises explore the legitimate use of social networking tools to gain customer intimacy and improve relationships, there are a number of factors that can make deployment more effective

Corporate social networking usage has grown out of message boards, Lotus Notes and intranets and is embracing collaboration tools and the social Web to increase productivity and profitability.  More corporates are using social networking as a response to the rise in globalization and dispersed workforces, and as a way of opening access to business-critical skill sets and information. But, there are a number of reasons why corporates must focus on achieving specific, measurable objectives in a corporate-created social networking environment that encourages positive rather than negative results.

Firstly, there’s significant evidence that social networking sites blur the lines between business and personal relationships. Although this might cause inappropriate behavior as personal lives move into the workplace, it’s more likely to cause ethical dilemmas for staff and exposure of valuable corporate brands to the vagaries of individuals or user groups. Companies can therefore struggle to delineate what social networking use is appropriate for their staff without over-reaching and denying access altogether to common tools such as Web browsers. There is some evidence to suggest that Web-browsing decreases productivity, but most firms deem it fair to allow access to a variety of Web sites and social Web applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Plaxo during work hours.

Who owns social networking within the organization?

Secondly, firms can fail to effectively deal with this situation because no one corporate discipline fully ‘owns’ social networking. Sometimes the IT department has control, sometimes Human Resources oversees this function. In practice it’s best to place the technical management of the social networking domain with the IT department, but have Human Resources, Sales or Marketing report to the CIO or CEO on the business benefits of such tools. IT and the CIO must meet regularly to ensure that tools are not being misused and to maintain a common fair usage policy for all employees. Problems commonly arise where listed firms must communicate material statements to their shareholders first, but run the risk of overzealous employees doing their job for them and releasing information to the general market illegally.

Finally, firms can struggle to devise a system that measures ROI. This can stem from a lack of clear objectives for the use of social networking tools. Although interaction with customers and partners is relatively straightforward to rationalize, companies must define their own measurement system that places value on employee-to-employee interaction if they are to derive full productivity benefits. Understanding how social networking tools can be used to boost discrete corporate functions helps to define who uses which applications, and with what end result.

Common internal uses include live communication and interaction based on presence applications; staff training, mentoring and performance monitoring; project collaboration; information sharing; knowledge management; social mapping for succession planning and unified communications. External uses include public relations and marketing products, events, ideas and new services; corporate social responsibility dissemination; market or competitive research; staff productivity; recruitment; project management.

Best practice for social networking

In an ideal world, the best way to tackle the challenges of introducing and benefitting from social networking is for corporates to build their own social networking framework that includes all the productivity tools employees need without recourse to them using their personal tools at work. Software developers such as Jive, Yammer, Social Text, YourMembership.com, Select Minds, SocialGO, WackWall and Ning offer different approaches.

Industry heavyweights such as the Cisco Collaboration platform provide options for big multinationals that include telepresence, unified communications and customized Instant Messaging options. Google Wave offers a centralized Web resource for collaboration across text, video, and document creation and sharing that provides an interactive record of social networking sessions.

In order to properly deploy any social networking system, best practice dictates that:

• There be a plan in place to monitor and mitigate potential reputational risks associated with inappropriate social networking site usage
• The divide between a right to know what employees are expressing online with their right to retain privacy is mitigated, and kept in context by helping them understand appropriate usage
• A code of ethics should be maintained and updated regularly, such as this one from Marks & Spencer
• Discussion of the use of social networking in the corporation must be elevated to the board level, as it is a strategic issue.

How social media adds value

• Organizational and geographical boundaries are bridged, with corporate information and discussion taking place on central, shared resources such as blogs and wikis, rather than on email or on the phone
• Teams can easily find the information they need, because social networking adds context, tags and social bookmarks to data that helps others find it more rapidly
• Employees with specific skill sets can easily connect with co-workers through user profiles and expert searches, and gain information that helps them do their job more productively.

Social media business leaders

• Best Western sponsors ‘On The Go With Amy,’ an evolving travelogue
• IBM Bloggers are encouraged to post to the site
• Coca-Cola employee Phil Mooney blogs on Coca-Cola Conversations
• Ford has pioneered Social Media Press Releases to communicate news using a variety of formats
• Kodak has dedicated a whole site to the development of social interaction with potential customers called 1000 Words.
• …As does Johnson & Johnson
• The New York Times has launched TimesPeople Beta, its social networking community
• Starbucks is currently asking its customers how to run the company, through My Starbucks Idea
• Suppository brand, Anusol, has launched a Facebook community
• MTV has extended its brand into the lives of viewers by offering an online interactive resource called Think MTV that deals with social issues.

The full article can be found here