Help yourself, please.

Today, I had the opportunity to hear John Ragsdale of TSIA talk a bit about the role that social media is playing and will continue to play in the customer service industry.  It’s interesting to note that while CRM took about 10 years to achieve adoption, we are seeing a pretty strong adoption of social media as a customer support tool within about 2 years.  Obviously, it’s still in a chaotic stage, but it’s quite significant to just have organizations embracing a new communication tool at such an early stage.  Based on some of the areas which John is currently researching, there is going to be huge push this year from corporate America to invest in social support systems.

When we talk about social support systems, we’re mainly talking about wikis, communities and forums.  This is the kind of stuff that companies like Lithium have been doing for their clients for a while now.  On some level, this type of support also includes Twitter posts and general questions coming through the social media ecosystem, but we’re mainly talking about these defined channels setup by the company to accept and answer questions.  Ideally those questions will be addressed by the community, but often a moderator will be required.

This is something that we tell our clients everyday as a basic use case for social media, and it’s great to see that companies are actively planning on investing money in social media as a real channel for helping their customers.  However, John did point out that there is no conclusive study that shows call volume to phone centers dropping in any material way (often not at all) as a result of these support systems.  However, based on my interactions with community managers in consumer facing business (non-enterprise), they are seeing increases in queries that would typically be routed to a call center.  Personally, I think that consumer facing companies will begin to achieve a savings on calls being replaced with social media inquiries, but it is going to take some time for the volume to increase and demonstrate a significant effect.

For this year, I agree with John that companies will look to find new ways for their customers to essentially help themselves.  While there is a strong interest in social media, there is a mismatch across the board with respect to the human resources dedicated to the space.  Until those resources are allocated, the emphasis will remain on building up a community that can support itself.

Slides from his presentation are below: