Recent blog posts, Tweets and traditional press releases reveals that “social CRM” is destined to be an evolutionary link as the providers of old-guard contact center infrastructure embrace the world of the real-time Web, peer-to-peer platforms, ratings engines and social networks. It may start with monitoring the mentions of you company or brand on Twitter (try it using search.twitter.com). But such efforts tend to be pale, passive efforts to detect and occasionally deal with customer complaints.

On the back-end, we’ve already noted how Salesforce.com’s electronic commerce cloud (EC2) has been integrated with Twitter, Cisco and even Google Wave to support better tracking of activity over multiple channels.

Yesterday, the list of “social CRM” offerings got longer with newly assembled alliances bringing Kana together with Baynote and Lithium Technologies stepping up promotion of the term “social CRM” with a Virtual Seminar that includes sponsors like Genesys Labs, LivePerson and Cognizant, as well as Lithium.

But “Social CRM” is but a link in an evolutionary step away from one-sided vendor- or brand-driven management of customer activities. “Sessions” often start with a call to an interactive voice response (IVR) system which gives a limited set of options for routing a call or retrieving information. It’s like a voting machine where the candidates or propositions are all pre-defined and all one can do is choose among little-known candidates or indicate “yes” or “no” on an unclear proposition.

Adding Baynote, Lithium, HiveLive or other peer-to-peer resources adds multiple dimensions to a traditionally one-sided, one-to-one interaction. It may start with monitoring multiple social networks, but quickly supports cultivation of networks of customers who ideally serve as sources of collective intelligence and feedback. In the best cases they can emerge as product or brand advocates, but at a minimum they can respond to customer queries or complaints in real time.

Success is predicated on customers building confidence in their own power over Web based resources. The next evolutionary step will be awareness raising – no so much among vendors – but among customers themselves. For social CRM to work customers must build a sense of trust in the feedback and query results they get regarding the retailers, companies and service providers with whom they carry out business.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Genesys, Recombinant Telephony, Cisco, Google Wave, Social CRM, Kana, Lithium