[...] How Customer Support Organizations Must Evolve – Jeremiah Owyang – Sep ‘09 [...]

[...] Social Support movement is afoot (see opportunities), and more companies will be connecting existing marketing and support systems with the social web. [...]

And they get what they pay for: people who are not motivated to improve customer service, will not go out of their way to sell anything, and will spend their days learning a few skills and then leaving for a more enlightened employer.

[...] Social Support movement is afoot (see opportunities), and more companies will be connecting existing marketing and support systems with the social web. [...]

[...] Social Support movement is afoot (see opportunities), and more companies will be connecting existing marketing and support systems with the social web. [...]

[...] How Customer Support Organizations Must Evolve – Jeremiah Owyang – Sep ‘09 [...]

[...] How Customer Support Organizations Must Evolve « Web Strategy by … [...]

What other function in the organization has such direct, intimate contact with customers? What other function controls the type of muli-channel, actionable customer data that is housed within customer service systems? Its not marketing. Its not sales, finance or operations. Its customer service and support. Perhaps its a confidence issue from having the ‘cost center’ message drilled over and over.

I wonder if a changing of the guard is required to radically shake up the prevailing management thinking within customer support. i read an article almost 8 years ago with the title “Should Marketing own the Contact Center”. The challenge with getting a seat at the corporate strategy table? Nobody is going to pull the chair out and offer it. Customer Support has to take it. Leveraging some of your tactics here is a good start. Absent of that, perhaps ownership by a function that already has a seat at the table, dragging customer support along, would accomplish the same goal.

[...] most companies that provide great products or services are happy about this development. Providing great customer service is just one example of how to get positive word of [...]

[...] How Customer Support Organizations Must Evolve Along the same lines of the previous pick, Jeremiah Owyang expands on how customer service organizations must evolve and adapt to survive the rapid changes in customer communication. Slides from Jeremiah’s recent presentation on the topic are included in the post. Share this post with others: [...]

Love that you broke out this post so clearly. And the point you made above – that customers don’t care what department you’re in – is spot on, and something I’ve been railing against for ages. The idea of “that’s not my job” just isn’t the same as it used to be.

The lynchpin to a lot of this, of course, is empowering people to a) solve the problems they’re handed b) give them access to the people and information they need to do that and c) actually taking the issues that recur and use them to *change* the business practices. That’s where the long term cost savings and value comes in, when you shift your business to actually remove the problem areas when they become so.

We’re doing a lot of exploration right now into woven support-account-relationship management through our CRM integrations. The ability for companies to listen carefully now changes the external expectations for how quickly, efficiently, and deeply we can solve customers’ problems. It’s not hollow to say, yet again, that times are changing.

Thanks for the post.

Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@ambercadabra

This is really a “who moved my cheese” moment, If customers have moved away from your formal support group (in some cases, they are self-supporting each other away from your customer team) then they need to quickly evolve or get out of the way.

Heidi,great question about applicability of this in B2B as well as B2C. My organisation BT (British Telecom) serves both customers and I am responsible for our social activities in the B2B space. We are finding great opportunity in both areas. The volumes are higher in the B2C space (15 X more customers), but the value tends to be higher in the B2B space.

In the B2B space we are using Twitter for customer support, lead capture, marketing and brand monitoring, as well as participating on internal and external support forums. We have set up Ideation to capture feedback from customers and are continuing to develop use cases which let us engage with our customers where they want to deal with us.

We also have created an online community where business in the UK can go to do business and build out their online presence to leverage social media http://www.bttradespace.com

There is still much to do, and I would like to see us develop a portal to bring together more the B2C and B2B communities like Dell does on their collaorative site.

I think companies are still learning about the opportunity to build the voice of the customer into our processes in Sales, Marketing, Products and PR. The growth of word of mouth marketing and the ability for customers (whether businesses or consumers) to interact with each other in a frictionless way will transform B2B as much as it will B2C in my view.

Would be interested to see links or references to more B2B specific case studies though.

You also have to make sure that is not the ONLY support they get. Self-supported groups are fine when the answers can all be found within the group, but fails miserably and becomes a network for negative energy when questions go unanswered (by the company). Google is a perfect example of a failure in the area.

Personally I think twitter is horrible for customer support unless there is another location (forum) that is also used as the foundation of support (linked to). Considering the life cycle of a tweet, most efforts will be lost over the long term. Twitter users also have the expectation of immediate action. If users are getting support to simple answers that they easily could have found on their own (if they tried), why would they make the effort in the first place? How does support improve for the non-twitter users?

It is also extremely frustrating to watch “lazy users” get quick support (because it is only 140 character), while detailed efforts go unanswered for months!

How to we get companies to support their own products in a timely fashion?

[...] Great summary for any leadership in any organzation! Found at http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/09/09/how-customer-support-organizations- Customer support is tactical, a cost-center, and the clean-up-kids at the company. Well, that’s [...]

Great discussion here. As Cory mentioned, we were talking about this very concept recently at Beer and Blog. It came up because I’m working with our VP of Support and Services on a presentation for the upcoming TSW conference about the hub and spoke model we’re using to extend customer support.

The CRM everyone is talking about is the need for workflow to delegate and supervise engagement that can be tracked by customer profile. We’re using an integration between Salesforce and Webtrends Social Measurement, which is powered by Radian6. Dave’s presentation will cover the business processes, staffing structure, value gained, and current gaps. Sending this link to him for commentary.

Question I’ve been wrestling with: I’m all on board with all of this, but what if the company is 100% in enterprise sales? It’s not as if there still can’t be benefit from using social media channels, of course, but I haven’t yet seen anyone make the case. If your customers are, say, Alaska Airlines or Starbucks, how many of these rules still apply? Should those entities still be encouraged to reach out and help each other?

In short, what if you deal with corporations, not individual consumers? How would you make the case for B to B?