Ambient Awareness, Social Media and Customer Service

I really can’t stop thinking about pushing clients into this idea of having proactive customer support by using the ambient awareness provided by social media. (No one’s biting, of course, because clients’ purse strings have been double-knotted.) More below about how you can use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create ambient awareness for all your customers.

Marketing clients will respond well to the idea that customer service doubles as PR to a degree — clients broadcast each customer service conversation.

The difficulty for many clients is overcoming the fear that something they say will be taken out of context. But rather, using social media for customer service actually provides more context. By using social media, a company will have so many examples of great service that the dreaded slip-up matters less.

Integrating Twitter Into Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Using social media for customer service is great in theory. But how do we put it into practice?

I did a little digging, and found this sweet little hack to hook up a Twitter account with a customer’s account in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It seems like a no-brainer to integrate that.

The hack doesn’t let you tweet back to them, and you have to manually search for things like your company or product name.

To digitally create your company’s “ambient awareness” of your customers’ needs, your customer service team should create and update searches. That list would create alerts for customer service reps to follow up on. Pretty cool.

P.S. I swear that I’ll start writing about writing again soon. I do enjoy researching these little diversions…