Where is your Social Caring team?

Many applications are struggling in the Social CRM market space nowadays and more and more are trying to “verticalize” their features in order to adapt them to the traditional customer-facing processes. This is the case of Customer Operations and specifically of Customer Service approach through well-consolidated processes adopted in contact centres. Since the Social CRM capabilities’ drivers come from Social Listening/Monitoring and traditional CRM activities, there is a consistent effort from vendors coming from the CTI world that are trying to match these two aspects, replicating what’s in place in your contact centres (see image below) and minimizing impacts on processes through the delivery of concepts like “universal queue” (in other words: assembling customer interactions coming from different channels - included social media - and assigning them to CSRs thanks to business rules and constraints).

So the integration between social and traditional approaches is set on the upper side of the Customer Service chain (contact management layer).

This is for sure a reasonable perspective especially for COOs that are really careful to performance and cost issues. However, are we sure that this is the right or at least the most complete perspective to use? People complaining or asking for commercial information are physically the same independently if they use a phone, an email, or other touchpoints. Nevertheless, are we really confident that they also behave in the same manner or (worse) they use those touchpoints with the same expectations?

How many social media gurus have told you that social customer will have an impact on your business through social media because of their characteristics of being “public” and “networked”? Well, do you know what? They are right. And if they are right, it also means that social customer is more careful about its expectations, satisfaction and its power to spread publicly frustration and rage against bad service.

Therefore, COOs have to understand that, in addition to cost issues, they need to cope with social interactions in a more dedicated way. And that’s possible, in my humble opinion, only if you use an organizational perspective which set a dedicated social caring team with specific responsibilities and skills (particularly oriented to the management of the relationship through social media) with their own service levels and business workflows. In other words, I believe that the integration between social and traditional approaches must be executed in the lowest side of the Customer Service chain (operational CRM or case management layer) to allow the final collection of all interaction data in a unique place.

What do you think? Please leave in the comments your point of view.