It’s a “Social” — How to Get Your Help Desk Into the Party!

We here at helpdesk.com have been talking about the social/support paradigm — i.e. Facebook, Twitter — for quite some time now. We believe social sites like these provide an excellent forum for IT and CRM folk to augment and enhance their go-forward customer support strategies.

Be it internal help desk support or external customer care management, social site integration — as part of the overall support mission and strategy — is now critical. Users engage with these sites every day…in fact several times a day. Engagement begins where the users are…and the easier you make it for your users to engage…or complain…communicate…or simply report an issue…the better a job you’ll have in mitigating frustration and increasing response time and user satisfaction.

There’s a reason why help desk and CRM providers are increasingly integrating social support and integration into their software and platforms.  In fact, many vendors have already begun to introduce smart phone apps — for users and help desk technicians — taking social integration — and help desk support in general — mobile! As a help desk manager or software buyer/evaluator, it’s important you consider this increasingly important channel — social and mobile! — when making updates and changes to how you provide your support.

We came across the following article in InformationWeek and thought we’d share it as part of this quick write-up — How Social Can Improve Customer Service: Expert Advice. We suggest you give the article a read to get some interesting insights and perspectives into social site usage and how it’s changing…if not bettering…the help desk.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Kate Leggett, senior analyst at Forrester, said it’s important for organizations to understand what communications channels customers want to be interacting on, then develop a social networking service model from there. For example, “once you have established that Facebook is the right medium to engage with your customers, you can offer customer service either from a separate tab on your Facebook page or by listening to comments on your Facebook page and engaging customers who need help.”

Leggett added that there is no right way to set up customer service presence on a social network, but that there are some basic tenets companies need to follow. For example, if you do decide to leverage Facebook, “ensure that your customer service services are tied back to what is offered by your company on your site, and ensure that you follow the same business processes for inquiries routed over Facebook as what you offer from your company website [so] that Facebook is not seen as a backdoor to your customer service organizations.”

Social networks can provide important data on the problems customers are having most often, as well as the products they would like to see changed (and how)–but only if you listen.

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