Customer support organizations were the earliest of adopters for CRM systems. Thanks to call center software and the need to drive cost reductions and faster service turn-around cycles, the customer support organization developed solid business processes, comprehensive measurement and good discipline. But that's all so last-century.
All those customer support disciplines, metrics and best practices were developed when the relevant parts of the web were static HTML and email. Social networking consisted of majordomo list management. All the social power of blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube LinkedIn, social media metrics and reputation management hadn't been invented yet.
And those things really matter to customer support, whether you're talking about consumers or businesses. Social media can magnify and accelerate customer dissatisfaction problems, taking them to global scale in just hours. In the political realm, this effect took down several despots last year. For companies, a web firestorm about customer satisfaction can develop overnight&and if you aren't paying attention, out of your view and control.
Worst Practice #1: Ignore Social Network Effects
There's been tons written about social media for the marketing and sales departments, but until recently there's been less about these issues for the customer support/service teams. There's a terrific posting here if you want a quick read, but watch out: The topic is fractal, and you may end up going way deep into community shepherding, reputation management and other neat time-sinks.
The cloud by its nature encourages social network effects, so your support organization needs to get these basics under control:
- Customer portal(s) to exchange product/service information in a controlled way (gated community) and collect as much structured Case/Incident data as you can.
- Forums and community management to accomplish the following:
-- harness the good side of customer self-support (particularly, having a "guru" program to encourage customer contributions to solutions, best-practices, and workarounds), and
-- contain the negative effects of the forum echo chamber ("we reported this bug 3 hours ago, we can't believe it isn't patched yet&this product just sucks!")
