Open Pro-active Customer Service: A Social Media trend for 2011

2011 is going to be the year when making/creating/doing with social media begins to gain the ascendency over messaging/using people as a channel.
And it will be customer service that leads the way.

It's increasingly high on the agenda of many orgs - and many are starting to see the value of engaging in social media to ramp up their levels of service.

Open Pro-active Customer Service delivers both ROI and a powerful reminder of the convergence required. In reality customers don't neatly sort their intended interactions with brands or orgs to fit into your existing silos (eg customer service, PR, direct sales etc).

They never did.

Now that customers have the easy ability to publish their needs, complaints and intentions in real time (not always at you, but always available to you) you can identify the areas of critical convergence, surface issues and act to build better products and services in response.

Open Pro-active Customer Service means:

• Doing you customer service in public - Good service should be seen to be done. And it's harder to do bad service with an audience (which can always include the boss).
• Actively seeking out customer feedback eg searching all open conversations.
• Wikifixing: Creating dataflows to ensure when issues are surfaced they are flowed to the key part of the org for solution.
• Being Prepared for organisational change as the requirement for new roles and shared cross-departmental responsibilities become clear.

Related articles

• infographic by Get Satisfaction - The Fastest Way to Lose Customers (socialwayne.com)
• Why Social Media is Inseparable From Customer Service (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• "Best Social Media Customer Service" Finalists Discuss Their Success [INTERVIEWS] (mashable.com)