Enterprises are embracing social customer relationship management
(CRM) software, with four in 10 leading businesses expected to
adopt this technology within five years as part of their ongoing
efforts to improve customer service, according to Gartner.
Within the next 24 months, 30 percent of leading enterprises will
incorporate social CRM, the research firm said in a report on
Thursday.
"There is strong corporate awareness, including at corporate
executive levels, of social networks and their potential impact on
corporate brand management and customer service perception. We
expect the high-profile nature of social networks and social CRM
for customer service to rapidly advance adoption from early adopter
to mainstream deployments, despite the volatile and rapid evolution
of social networks in general," said Drew Kraus, research VP at
Gartner, in a statement. "As awareness and use of social networks
increases, customer service executives and planners are feeling
increasing pressure from corporate executives to articulate a
strategy for how this new communication channel will be harnessed
so that they don't get left behind."
Although marketing departments initially began corporate
deployments to oversee brand management via Twitter feeds and
Facebook fan pages, more social media-aware businesses are
recognizing that employees who interact with customers via these
sites also can provide customer service functions, at times much
faster than those working in traditional customer service
capacities such as phone banks or email response centers, Gartner
said.
Smaller companies also are adding social media into their marketing
and customer support plans: A January report by SugarCRM found that
72 percent of the small and midsize businesses they surveyed
planned to link data from social networks into their CRM software
this year. However, only 26 percent had done so at the time of the
study, the report found.
Users want — and expect — businesses to respond to
their questions and complaints via social media, a May 2010 report
by consulting firm Accenture said. The study of communications and
high-tech vendors revealed that firms' efforts to improve their
customer service failed to impress their business and residential
customers about 60 percent of the time. But the study also
discovered that 92 percent of business customers and 81 percent of
consumers said they are more likely to continue doing business with
vendors whose support they believe has improved.
"Companies are investing in customer service," said Joe Hughes,
senior executive with Accenture's customer service and support
business, told InformationWeek when the report was released, "but
at the same time customer expectations are rising — in many
cases faster than the investments. Some of the investment has been
to reduce costs, which favorably impacted the way clients perceive
customer service, but the path to more profitable, longer lasting
customer relationships centers on improving the customer
experience."