Customer Interaction 2.0: Adopting Social Media as Customer Service Channel

Since customers first share their problems with a social networking community before directly addressing a company, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or Foursquare will be the interface between customer and company. For this reason, it is assumed that social networks will evolve into a common communication channel – not only between individuals but also between customers and companies. However, social networking has not yet been integrated into customer interaction management (CIM) tools. In general, a CIM application is used by the agents in a contact centre while communicating with the customers. Such systems handle communication across multiple different channels, such as e-mail, telephone, Instant Messaging, letter etc. What we do now is to integrate social networking into CIM applications by adding another communication channel. This allows the company to follow general trends in customer opinions on the Internet, but also record two-sided communication for customer service management and the company’s response will be delivered through the customer’s preferred social networking site.