Technology is Just the Enabler for Cross-Channel Customer Care in the Social Era. It's About People & Processes

In my last blog post Customer Care In the Era of Social Media, we discussed how social CRM solutions make the transition to this new world of customer care a lot smoother. Integration with CRM is key to have an integrated cross-channel view across social and traditional channels ' emails and call center interactions. If you respond to a comment, question, or concern on social channels, you can track it using a social CRM solution of choice. After that, anyone with access to that same information will be able to see that you assisted this particular customer before. They'll be able to see the conversations that occurred, as well as any notes that you've included to the conversation records.

Why is this important? Well, it saves you time from asking a lot of repetitive questions that ultimately annoy consumers if they have to answer the same ones too many times. It also gives you the benefit of having a user's past conversation history in front of you, which can help you to detect important patterns. But it also lets your customers know that you value them and their time to keep such accurate records so that you don't waste their time asking for information they've provided before. This is just the start with multi-channel customer support. Things are progressing fast, from multi-channel to cross-channel, where a customer issue raised on one channel e.g. social, is then addressed and closed on another channel e.g. over the phone or email. Such advances in cross-channel customer care are critical to offer a seamless customer experience.

If you wish to progress from the traditional channel customer care provider to a cross-channel customer experience enabler, you need the technology platform and infrastructure that enables such a process. In most cases, companies have existing CRM solutions that they use to provide support through traditional channels, and the challenge is in identifying and implementing a Social CRM solution with little disruption to business and also a solution that seamlessly integrates with the existing CRM solution.

When technology parity is established to deal seamlessly across social and traditional channels, it also provides your company the ability to leverage your current investments in processes and people skills. You will be able to extend the same business processes and people skills that you already have in place to now include Social channels.

So the most important considerations are people, processes and technology. Technology is just an enabler. The good news is that you now have the ability to extend the above three aspects without major disruptions or investments.

If you're not making moves to offer integrated customer care services across your channels, both social and traditional, you're going to start falling behind when it comes to the customer experience race. It's time to adopt cross-channel customer care initiatives.

How is your business adjusting to social customer service techniques? Are you embracing cross-channel customer care initiatives? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.