Perspectives on Social Media & Services in 2012

There’s no shortage of blogs and articles predicting what 2012 has in store for social media. Search on “social media predictions for 2012″ and you’ll receive upwards of 145,000 results! However, 99.999% of these results are specific to marketing, the outlook for Google+, whether Klout can be trusted, and so on.

Search on “social media predictions for services in 2012″ and it’s a completely different story. Not a single result from any of the top search engines. Nothing. Nada. But we all know that social media isn’t just a marketing tool, right?

We’re here to talk about the intersection of technology services and social media. TSIA has a landmark research report coming out this month called “The State of Social Media & Technology Services 2012” (and we’ll be blogging about these issues as well), but in the meantime, we wanted to hear from TSIA partners and industry consultants who work closely with tech companies in social media & services.

We asked them for their thoughts on how social media will impact technology services in 2012. And here’s what they said:

#1 Companies Will Recognize Services IS Marketing

David Kay, DB Kay & Associates

Social media will catalyze productive conversations between the support and marketing organizations.  Marketing drives the social media strategy and presence, but most of the issues customers want to talk about are service and support.  (How often do customers say, “I love their product, but I wish their marketing team was more responsive?”)

To get through 2011, most enterprises relied on ad hoc and informal connections between marketing and support, but even for B2B companies, it’s clear in 2012 that there needs to be a purposeful, integrated strategy.  This is a good thing:  in the world of Consumption Economics, service and support *is* marketing and sales.  Working together in social media is a good start.

David Kay, Principal, DB Kay & Associates (and reformed marketing executive)
Blog: http://www.dbkay.com/read-the-blog/

#2 Organizational Walls Will Come Tumblin’ Down

Francoise Tourniaire, FT Works

A prediction is a wish, right? So my wish for social media this year is that it will erase the silos between the service team and the rest of the company/organization. Customers are never just support customers or product customers or marketing customers or sales customers – why treat them differently (and fussily so) for different types of transactions? Customer satisfaction is not a service issue, it’s a company-wide issue.

Perhaps the service teams owns listening to customers, but everyone has a stake and a responsibility in responding to customers’ queries and attending to their needs. Because social media interactions are public and visible, my hope is that they will rally organizations around customers and help service organizations fulfill their missions of delivering a great customer experience.

Francoise Tourniaire, Owner, FT Works
Website: www.ftworks.com

#3 Shifting Customer Expectations Will Become a Blessing or a Curse

Rachel Miller, Impact Learning

Social media is a blessing and a curse for technology services organizations. Delivering world-class customer service during standard business hours is no longer acceptable. Giving customers what they want, when they want it, no matter where they are – is crucial for success in 2012.

Social media is a powerful tool that is blurring the lines between customer service and marketing. Technology services organizations will need to be alert and responsive to customer needs with teams of well-trained technicians ready to engage with customers.

Rachel Miller, Customer Experience Professional, Impact Learning Systems
Blog: http://www.impactlearning.com/blog/

#4 Increase in Demand for Dedicated Staff

Jessica Brown, Citrix

The most significant way social media will impact tech services organizations is the demand for dedicated staff to monitor and respond to incidents.

In our organization, 70% of Twitter interaction is on the support side. We have a dedicated support staff member to make sure we deliver the best and fastest quality to customers on our social networks. Not only do we monitor our Twitter handles and pages, we proactively search for hastags and keywords with our products. This allows us to proactively reach out to customers before the direct complaint is made to our organization.

Thus, we increase our customer satisfaction and decrease our support volume. [But it takes dedicated staff to do so].

Jessica Brown, Content Manager, Citrix Online
Website: http://citrixonline.com

#5 The Best is Yet to Come

Esteban Kolsky, Think Jar

With social media, the best is yet to come. No technology is what we think it is, and it takes time to figure it out and even more to do it right after learning the lessons of those who failed before us.

Until we get sufficient adoption of Social Media for business use (with correlated generation of good and bad cases and lessons learned from doing things right or wrong) there is no point in discussing what Social Business is, what Social CRM can be or how to exercise the collaboration muscle inherent to social adoption. 2012 will be about integrating social into the business, and I’m not talking opening a Twitter account.

Esteban Kolsky, Think Jar
Blog: http://estebankolsky.com/

#6 Customers Become Our New BFFs

Farrell Hough, Outsights

Customers will become part of the ‘services network’ and manage some Tech Services volume themselves… willingly.  Customers will no longer sit across the table from you… they will be working side-by-side with you.  Social media done well can help establish this relationship. Much like we’ve seen with online support communities, peer-to-peer support will take shape in emerging channels if cultivated correctly.

All customers, regardless of in the office or at home, have social media channels of choice.  Tech services organizations will increase their accessibility to customers by managing communications consistently in select social media channels.  It isn’t about ‘doing Twitter.’  That isn’t enough.  It has to be done right.  Those who leverage that access well, have a small window of opportunity to strengthen the customer relationship with personalized responsiveness (Best Buy, Comcast, VMware).  If trust is established, the relationship is maintained with relevant and personalized content, conversation and recognition.

Farrell Hough, Managing Principal, Outsights, Inc.
Website: www.outsights.com

#7 Evolve from Transactional Model to Engagement Model

David Lowy, Moxie Software

In 2012, we will see social media solidifying the business transformation started a couple of years ago. Some analysts are predicting that among some of the biggest trends for this year, “organizations will evolve from transactional systems to engagement systems. Engagement requires a different design point and business model for success.  Engagement must account for sense and response, massive social scale, conversation, new user experiences, real-time, and multichannel networks among other factors.”

Over the past few years, there has been a shift from using social media to research companies prior to a purchase to expecting full support via social media.  This is driving a similar shift from marketing based social media solutions to contact center based solutions, which is supported by social customer profiles.

To support enterprises’ critical interactions with their customers in this new era of engagement systems, tech services organizations must:

• Integrate the social media component to other channels, supporting a multi-channel communication hub with email, chat, self service, click 2 call, social media, co-browse and virtual assistant
• Focus on productive, consistent and appealing engagement tools
• Implement an enterprise social software to ensure end-to-end communications, delivering faster and more accurate responses to customers
• Develop standards for social media filtering, responses and cross-functional escalations
• Create a model for a social customer profile design
• Deliver social media reporting and analytics capabilities and integrated with legacy support channels
• Incorporate social tools to legacy systems so organizational knowledge can be leveraged
• And support feedback management tools through surveys and forum engagement

2012 Starters:

• Catalog your corporate social accounts.  You will be surprised how many your organization has acquired
• Catalog your enterprise’s social tools in use
• Create an inter-department social response team
• Define a social profile
• Build a proof of concept in the contact center

David Lowy, VP of Product Management, Moxie Software
Website: www.moxiesoft.com

#8 Focus Turns to Optimization & Formalization

Nick Sellers, Sykes

Social media for tech services? As a communication channel it’s here to stay, alongside voice and chat, because it offers different–sometimes better–options to customers and companies alike. Social media for tech services in 2012? Here are my top five predictions:

1. Email will diminish because customers prefer to use community forums and chat.
2. Companies will focus on a small selection of social channels, dedicate more talent to working with these, and improve their usability.
3. Online self-help and knowledge will be dramatically improved, using a format and language that users relate to more readily, and more time spent educating users how to get the best from these.
4. Intelligence gathered from users through social media and traditional channels will influence the two points above, and provide faster, more meaningful product development.
5. The growth of social media channel adoption will slow down (continuing a more lazy climb), while the impact of social media on services will continue as companies optimize and formalize the channel.

Nick Sellers, Director, Global Marketing, Sykes Global Services
Blog: journey2excellence.com

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What are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree? What aspect of social media do you think will have the biggest impact on technology services this year?

Many thanks to TSIA partners and industry consultants for contributing their insights!