I agree with Harish Kotadia that Social CRM represents a huge opportunity for services companies.

He has create a follow-up post on how IT services companies can prepare for the opportunity covers some of the key steps to capitialise on these opportunities. Paraphrasing slightly, his recommendation is for organisations to

1 - evaluate ways their clients can:

• integrate social media channels into websites

• integrate the new channels into their Sales, Marketing & Support processes and systems

• include social media metrics in performance dashboards and SLAs

2 - develop delivery capability to address Social CRM requirements of their clients, partnering with leading vendors in key areas of Social CRM, namely:

• Social Media Measurement & Monitoring

• Customer Community Platforms

• Social Media and Network Analytics

To this I would add the complicating factors that (1) there are a large, changing number of players in #2, with a lot of experimentation at the moment and consolidation coming soon – see for example Michael Maoz from Gartner’s comments on this and (2) there’s a big integration challenge behind point 1 - between heavily structured CRM systems that may not be very integration friendly and a whole new world of often cloud based services. This integration will need to support a lot of change as companies as experiment and evolve their Social CRM implementations.

So I would add a third step to the prescription for services companies following this path, and that would be to investigate lightweight integration technologies that can bridge these old and new worlds cost-effectively and flexibly but without creating more hard-to-maintain complexity.

Just took a call from my phone provider that reinforced how giving agents the tools to do their job can make a massive difference. The conversation went something like this

Agent Hello, I’m just calling to make sure you are on the right tariff. Can I ask, what time of day do you make most calls, do you phone mobiles or overseas?

Me (not really concentrating) Mainly call in the evenings, weekends. Phone Australia every few weeks, some mobile calls.

Agent How much do you spend roughly per month?

Me I don’t know off-hand. Hang on, shouldn’t you know all this? Do you have access to your billing system?

Agent Yes – I can see you are on tariff X.

Me (surprised) But can’t you see how much I spend or what on?

Agent No, I don’t have access to that part of the system. But can I tell you what tariffs we have?

Me (lost interest) Don’t have time now – can you email something to me, or point me at them on the web site?

Agent Sorry sir we are a phone only call centre.

Me I don’t have time for this at the moment. I’ll look on line.

So ... I was initially well disposed to getting a call to check I wasn’t paying too much. But because the agent was put in the position of not having the right information or to be able to deal with me in the way I wanted, the net result was to encourage me to consider switching provider.

Because I spend a lot of my time talking to people in and around call centres, I can imagine there were lots of reasons for this that made “sense” at the time – such as that this team of agents can’t have access to the billing system because if contains sensitive information, or that agents generally don’t have email provided to them for all sorts of sensible concerns about managing channels of communication. However, the presumably unintended consequence is that the call to me had a pretty negative impact. This is unfortunate as it wouldn’t have been that much effort to mash up the solution the agent needed, giving them easy, safe access to suitably cut down applications and relevant information at the right point in the call

I’m sure there are better examples out there – would be good to hear about them.