Customer Service And The Social Web

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece called Top 10 Social Web Trends For The Decade. In it, I suggested that the way various business functions are done will change owing to the impact of the social Web, crowdsourcing, and so on. The areas that are seeing the most upheaval are customer services, which spans customer support, technical support, and related services. Below are observations from two 1M/1M entrepreneurs working in this area.

Girish Mathrobootham, CEO of Freshdesk, says, “More and more, customers are turning to social networks like Twitter or Facebook for support. The reasons are many. The traditional support channels like email or phone are slow and frustrating for customers, this is why businesses need to implement customer 360 systems. When a customer complains online on Twitter or Facebook, they see that usually they can reach someone higher up in the organization who is more knowledgeable and willing to help, and their problem is resolved faster as there is pressure on the company to manage its public image. While this may work in the short term, a better long-term strategy for the company is to ensure that people who are responsible for customer support can see customer feedback on social networks so that they can resolve those issues just as they do through normal channels like email and the phone.”

Freshdesk, winner of the recent Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge, addresses this issue by incorporating social CRM capabilities in their newly launched small business customer support solution.

Gioacchino La Vecchia, CEO of 1M/1M Premium company CrowdEngineering, says, “Customer service is changing [on a fundamental level], and new social trends are the main reason for this. Because customer service is built around the relationship with the customer, the new ways to communicate and to collaborate with users are perfect candidates to improve the relationship. That’s why we at CrowdEngineering think that it is one of the killer applications for crowdsourcing, the emerging trend of involving Internet users in enterprise activities. Starting from the assumption that many customers out there have the best answers to questions asked every day to your call centers, it is just matter of getting them aboard and involved in the customer service processes. And if you are able, as we are, to manage them and the quality of service, you just hired the best support team you may have at a fraction of the original cost.”

For B2C businesses with millions of contact center transactions a month, especially where technical support is a major issue such as in telecom or consumer electronics, CrowdEngineering introduces a platform for managing a crowd sourced “level zero” layer before contact center agents actually “touch” a customer. In this layer, “expert customers” equipped with access to knowledge bases and connected to the enterprise’s main support system solve issues. If they succeed, expensive support calls can be avoided. When they cannot resolve an issue, it is escalated through the normal system, seamlessly. These are very powerful opportunities to save millions of dollars and really impact the bottom line for these margin-challenged companies.

I expect to see more companies being created in this area, as the constant chatter on the social Web has expanded the contact center well beyond something that is walled off and into a very public domain. Customer service has long been a source of major headaches for businesses, and entrepreneurs have many opportunities to ease those headaches.