Yesterday, Lithium Technologies held the first of its “Get Real 2010” events, and I found it quite thought-provoking. As the name implies, the core topic under discussion was the ability for businesses to create and support genuine engagements with customers (and prospects for that matter). After Lithium’s CMO, Katy Keim (@katykeim) set the stage, Sean O’Driscoll (@seanodmvp), the CEO of social strategy consultancy Ant’s Eye View, described just how far most companies have moved along a continuum from Unaware to Experimentation to Operationalized to Integrated and then all the way to Fully Engaged.

As Sean sees it few, if any, companies companies are unaware of social media. Research that we’re conducting here at opus confirms that. Yet just as few have moved beyond Experimentation, largely because there are genuine cultural and technical challenges to putting plans into effect, integrating internal resources and ultimately fully engaging with customers. As he put it, “Believe me, your customers don’t want to ‘friend’ you, they want to get something done.”

Sean was followed by Barry Paperno, who launched and now nurtures the community of people using MyFICO (the community tool of the company that maintains your FICO credit score). Barry was able to describe some of the cultural and operational barriers that he encountered while fostering his community in what he termed “a very conservative company.”

My take-away, which is a theme Opus Research will be analyzing more thoroughly in the coming months, is the challenge of dealing with a natural tension between “Marketing” and “Support” as companies define their transformation to an engagement model. We see profound opportunity to leverage existing self-service and agent assisted services infrastructure by defining work flows that transcend the lines of demarcation between Web sites, IVRs, live agents, mobile networks and even face-to-face, in store conversations.

The point that Lithium and its guest speakers exposed is that every company that, thanks to high-profile implementers like Zappos or highly-successful low-profile community developments by the likes of FICO, the pendulum of power is swinging toward the customer. It’s going to take years, but the path to useful engagement models is becoming better beaten and both technical and cultural challenges are better defined.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, Collaborative Customer Care, Social CRM, Lithium