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…

Visit Qwest at http://socialmedia.qwest.com

Start Social Media Small, and Learn from It

For a large company like Qwest, starting with a small dedicated group with a motto of “Be Smart” will allow them to find what works and what doesn’t.

For example, what’s the best way to transfer a problem to the right person at Qwest? Perhaps when the social media team is small, transferring a customer to another department or to the normal customer service group makes sense. But once everyone in customer service has social media access, transfers should follow the normal problem resolution processes.

Use Your Social Media Team to Teach and Build

Starting small will also allow the social media team at Qwest to help develop the processes and technologies needed to integrate this technology to the Qwest CRM systems (the holy grail of customer service and social media).

The team will also be able to train other customer service reps in the ins-and-outs of Twitter as a medium (in the same way that the phone has ins-and-outs, and email has ins-and-outs, etc).

Social Media is Broadcast Customer Service

In a normal customer service situation, typically your conversation is relatively private (it’s recorded, but no one’s really going to use it unless things go COMPLETELY WRONG). But with social media, every customer interaction is out there in the open. You’re broadcasting your customer service.

Transparency good. Whining bad.

Thus, if I could make one suggestion to Qwest: tweets that say, “10 minutes until we go home for the night!” make a bad impression. Transparency is great. Whining is not.

Have you seen other examples? Is your company considering it? What questions or concerns do you have?

I’d love to hear other case studies of using social media for customer service.

Twitter and Customer Service

Sometimes, I gotta write a blog post for the job. So today the focus was on how smart companies are using social media for customer service. I’d met with Martha Brooke from Interaction Metrics in the morning, and she dropped an interesting point: Her company helps businesses get the most out of their customer interactions, and social media is just another venue for those interactions. “Yes,” I thought. “Someone else who gets it.”

Her company has a great experience understanding and planning interactions for multiple customer personas. So why not just provide the customer service folks a few more simple, more trackable technologies? Why not evaluate the quality of customer service interactions usings social media tools?

Update: I posted a case study about Qwest using social media for customer service.

• http://www.coneinc.com/content1182
• http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/2008/09/social-media-as.html

September, 2008: Sixty percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media Web sites. One in four interacts more than once per week. These are among the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study.

Social Media and Customer Service Case Study: HP

• http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/39468

As HP’s experience shows, social media is changing the way we must think about customer service. The cost of poor service, once measured in single consumers, can now have an immediate impact far and wide.

Social Media Implications on Operations, PR, Marketing, HR, Customer Relations

• http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2008/05/social-media-disasters-or-how-not.html

Just like that point in time in the Internet’s infancy, social media has not yet been understood or embraced by most organizations and brands. Even if the ROI is hard to calculate today, it would be wise to consider the harm done by NOT having an organized approach to social media.

Social Media Case Studies

• http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/02/a-chonology-of-brands-that-got-punkd-by-social-media/

A list of companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.