• by Anand Subramanian , October 4, 2011

Social media present a great opportunity for businesses to reach and serve customers where they "live," grow revenue, and reinforce brands. As brands consider social customer engagement, they should leverage the best practices that have emerged from the experiences of early adopters. Here are four such practices.

1. Do I need to go social?

On average, social media are a better fit for consumer product or services companies that serve broad markets. If you are a niche B2B business that sells complex products and services to a small set of clients, the business impact of social customer engagement will be limited.

2. Where should I go?

"One size does not fit all" when it comes to social media. Online forums and professional social networks like LinkedIn are more relevant for B2B businesses than broad social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Moreover, answers to complex B2B queries do not lend themselves to the character limitations of a medium like Twitter, further limiting the fit. Pick the media that make sense for your business and prioritize your investments accordingly.

3. Rethink speed of engagement

The speed of social can thrill or kill. The velocity of market influence and the resulting brand enhancement or damage is exponentially higher in social media -- this applies to business brands (e.g., the "United Airlines broke my guitar" episode) or even personal brands (e.g., Tiger Woods). Therefore, the speed and quality of customer engagement need to be much higher in social media than in traditional channels. Make sure your organization has the policies, technology, knowledge, process, and people in place to provide high-speed, high-quality customer engagement that is required by social media before jumping in.

4. Unify social with traditional

Customer engagement silos came about when enterprises added new communication channels without ensuring that they were integrated with existing ones. In some instances, these silos were created since there were no unified platforms available for early adopters of customer interaction management systems. This approach has created inconsistent and discontinuous customer experiences. In fact, our multichannel customer service "mystery shopping" research of leading U.S. companies in 2010 found that customer service consistency across channels further deteriorated from its lackluster performance a year ago -- 71% of the companies assessed in 2010 posted a "poor" score, compared to 60% in 2009. U.S. enterprises also received a failing grade in cross-channel context retention in a 2009 evaluation by Forrester Research.

The last thing consumers want is more multichannel amnesia and dysfunction that extend to the high-exposure social channel. Therefore, brand-aware, customer-focused enterprises are planning a unified approach, where contact center agents and online community managers are able to operate from a 360-degree view of traditional and social customer interactions, and customers don't have to repeat information and recreate context as they go across social and traditional channels.

The "Customer Interaction Hub" (CIH) approach, originally advocated by Gartner for the multichannel contact center, can help attain this unified view of interactions, when extended to social communications. Moreover, the CIH approach enables you to map existing customer data to their social profiles for easy identification and consistent and context-aware service across traditional and social channels. In B2B scenarios, the CIH will also ensure that you provide the right level of service across traditional and social channels -- for example, a platinum client would receive platinum service across traditional and social.

These best practices are just some of the early ones to emerge. Businesses should pay careful attention to these lessons from the trenches before going social.

Anand Subramaniam brings 15 years of experience in leading high-tech companies to his position as the Vice President of Marketing for eGain.