Jacada Blog

Register today for an upcoming webinar featuring Brent Leary of CRM Essentials and Chris Du Toit of Jacada.

Getting Social, Traditionally Speaking
March 16, 2011
11am ET

Join us for a complimentary webinar guaranteed to get you talking.  Our experts will discuss the importance of integrating social tools and strategies into traditional customer service processes as well as the challenges associated with "going social." We will also touch on why companies need to have a good traditional foundation before implementing a social strategy.

We hope you can join us and participate in a lively discussion after the presentation. For more information and to register, click here.

Social CRM to Explode in the Immediate Future says Gartner Study

Social media has become an inescapable fact of life in the past 5 years and more frequently businesses are incorporating it into their overall strategy. In a recent study Gartner has determined that social media’s penetration will totally change the CRM landscape in the years immediately following 2011.
Read more here.

Jennifer Childress - Director of Marketing Communications, Jacada Inc.

 

2011: The Year Social CRM Goes Mainstream

In case you missed this article by Brent Leary, "2011: The Year Social CRM Goes Mainstream," which ran Dec. 27, 2010 on IncTechnology.com check it out here.  Jacada's CEO Tom Clear discusses the importance of integrating people and processes to recognize the benefits of social CRM within an organization.  We have a ways to go yet, but the wheels are turning and expect more to come in 2011. Read the entire article here. 

*Brent Leary was part of an analyst series that included blogs, whitepapers and webinars.  Read his blogs or listen to his webinar for more information on social CRM.

Jennifer Childress - Director of Marketing Communications, Jacada Inc.

The Long Term Future of Social CRM

This is my last post for this session with Jacada.  I want to really thank them for giving me the platform, I think it was an awesome series (did I mention this will be turned into an eBook in the next few days? You can then download the entire series and relive it anytime, anywhere – way cool!).

Last time I talked about the near-term, two-to-three year's horizon, for Social CRM.  This time I want to go a little bit further, focus on what happens after it reaches critical mass and is widely adopted.

But first, a little debunking.

Social CRM cannot do anything by itself.  

There is no software, magic motion, silver bullet, or Hogwarts' spell that will make it work and be useful as a stand-alone solution.  Actually, I don't even know what it means to do Social CRM as a stand-alone solution – are we talking about setting up a Twitter account? Creating a community? Either way, what I mean is that the only way you get some value of Social CRM is to realize that it is a part of a business – much like CRM was is. And ERP. And SCM. And…you get the idea.

So, how does the future look for Social CRM?

Fantastic, there are three things that will happen to Social CRM going forward:

1. Social CRM will integrate with CRM very well.  Your customers, partners, employees, entities-you-deal-with, etc, don't change who they are, or how they relate with you, just because you added new social Channels.  Social CRM (the ability to bring in those social channels, their data, and their value to CRM) has to work in harmony with your existing CRM solution.  If this integration does not happen, you merely implemented Social Media – added some new channels and their management tools, but have no idea what to do with them.
2. Social CRM becomes part of the Social Business evolution. Let's face it, the term as shiny, new, and cute as it may be really means nothing without being part of business.  Same as it happened with CRM.  Remember when CRM was a four-letter word? I do, I even wrote at that time that if you wanted to get CRM approved in your organization, you had to call it something else (Sally or John are popular names).  Bottom line, Social CRM is one core component of a Social Business – it will evolve to join forces with Enterprise 2.0 implementations (no, not the real ones – the internal collaboration as Enterprise 2.0 ones) and become the basis for a Social Business – organizations collaborating with customers, suppliers, partners, employees and others – in preparation for...
3. Social CRM disappears, as it became part of the Collaborative Enterprise. Look at this chart (figure 1), the evolution of Social X – I wrote about it before many times, this is all interim steps as we learn what it means to collaborate, to work together towards better organizations.  The collaborative enterprise model is about destroying the barriers between people and let whoever needs to collaborate in any situation freely do so.  It is about leveraging expertise and knowledge and data regardless of where it lives and what it is.  There is limited, at best, future for Social CRM as there was for electronic CRM, mobile CRM, and many others in the past.  It is not about adding a letter or word to CRM to make it better – it is about making CRM, Social CRM, Electronic CRM, and the many other flavors work better for the business.

I know all the reactions – this is going to take forever to do, there are no guarantees, it is just an opinion, etc.  

Actually, this is not just an opinion – this is the direction we are taking today's world.  The more customers, consumers, partners, suppliers and others that get exposed to what it means to “go social,” the more pressure there will be on organizations – all organizations – to become social businesses.

And later, collaborative enterprises.

What do you think? Am I off?

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

Using Social Channels to Show Customers You Care

When it comes to social media and customer service, many are familiar with the stories from Zappos, Comcast and a few other high profile companies.  I recently had an opportunity to speak with Drugstore.com’s Director of Customer Care Lisa Larson. With Drugstore.com being an online retailer since 1998, and Lisa being there from the beginning, their story has valuable perspectives and insights that companies looking to engage customers via social channels can learn a great deal from.  Especially Lisa's thoughts on using social networks, not only to get a better understanding of your customers, but also to allow them to get a better understanding of who you are.

Below are a few highlights of the conversation around how social media is impacting customers, customer service, Drugstore.com as a company, and Lisa's role as director of customer care.

Brent Leary:   How are social media tools helping you today? 

Lisa Larson:  They allow us to get out there.  Right now, we are out there in social media, in two areas with marketing.  That's drugstore.com and beauty.com.  But we are also out there on Twitter within Customer Care; we have Beauty Advisor and Directors Desk.  So we go out there and we talk to our customers and the social tools help us manage those contacts.  

BL:  Was that a big transitional change, being able to start communicating with customers, or have them communicate with you over social channels, as opposed to the more traditional channels? 

LL:  It was. It really was.  It's different.  You have to learn how to do it.  You start out rough.  I think most people probably do.  Not many people are doing this yet. They are trying to learn how to talk to their customers.  You are trying to learn if it should be personal or really professional.  I think there are different areas.  With our marketing and promotion, we have fun and customers get to know us as a store.  

But when you are sitting down and you are talking to someone within our Customer Care, its personal. You are talking to me and I am there to solve your problems and you will get to know who I am, or you will get to know who the beauty advisor is, because we are there to serve you.  Just like you walk into the corner store and you are talking to the person at the front desk, it's the same thing.  That is what social media is, it's the communication and we think that's important.  We want people to know us. 

BL:   So they can actually contact you on Twitter? 

LL:   They can contact me on Twitter.  They can contact my team on Twitter and we'll be there to talk to them.  We make sure that we actually use our escalation team or a team lead to talk back, because you cannot take things back.  There is one shot.  If you say the wrong thing or you create the wrong impression, it could be a bad brand experience and that's one thing we want to be cautious of.  We are learning.  We have put together processes.  We are building on those and the guidelines on how to speak to our customers in this arena. 

BL:  Are your reps really interested with being able to serve the customers in all these different formats and actually meet the customer where they are now? 

LL:  Absolutely. 

BL:  So they are reaching out to them on Twitter?  How is that impacting the way that they go about serving their customers? 

LL:  First of all, they love this.  The team that's on Twitter, they are out there in public, that's really cool to a CSR, for them to be seen and get to know the customers. That's something that is important to them.  For them, they see this as a win and its fun.  CSRs like to do different things, they want to try new forums, they like to chat, they want to do email and phone.  Social media is very different and new and for them to be a part of this program is very big and fun. 

BL:  Just to give us a sense, how many reps do you have? 

LL:  Overall we have over 150 CSRs, plus a management team. 

BL:  A certain number of them are interacting or all of them?  What percentage of them are actually out there? 

LL:  Within social media, just a small percentage of my escalation team.  I have got a team of ten right now that are trained and being trained.   We look at every social media site, every two to four hours, depending on the time. We have a schedule.  If there's an issue that is a Customer Care issue and they can quickly and easily respond to, they do.  

If it's a situation where they are not sure how to handle, they actually bring it forward and we have a social media team that includes marketing, legal, myself and HR.  There are some issues you want to be very cautious about.  

BL:  Does this social interaction translate to better relationships with your customers, now that they are getting a sense for knowing who you are?  Does it make it a more valuable interaction between customers and agents? 

LL:  It does.  They start caring for you.  Sometimes when you are online, or just on the phone or email, people almost forget that you are human.  When you put a face out there, or you put people out there and they get to know who you are, they treat you differently.  Our goal is to serve them and to solve their problems, and do it well.  I think I hear that and see it and know it.  Social media is a big part of that.  They can come and see who we are.  We fix their problem, they see us not only fixing their problems, but fixing everyone else's.  That means something to them.  You do it well, honestly, and openly, and you are going to create relationships.  They are going to like you for that.  It’s when you don't do it that way or when you ignore them - or you don't resolve their problem – that is when they won't trust you. 

That's a goal, to build trust because we want to fix every problem out there.  We want to do it well. We want to do it right. 

Brent Leary - Co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials LLC

Brent Leary is a crm industry analyst, advisor, author, speaker and award winning blogger. He is co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials LLC, an Atlanta based CRM advisory firm covering tools and strategies for improving business relationships. In 2009 he co-authored Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business.

Recognized by InsideCRM as one of the 25 most influential industry leaders, Leary also is a past recipient of CRM Magazine's Most Influential Leader Award.  He serves on the national board of the CRM Association, and on the advisory board of the University of Toronto's newly created CRM Center of Excellence. He's been quoted in several national business publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Entrepreneur magazine.  Leary writes the Social CRM column for Inc.com, and blogs at BrentLeary.com.  You can reach him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/BrentLeary.

Note: Brent Leary has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

The Near Term Future for Social CRM

I have enjoyed writing about Social CRM in this Jacada series, albeit it's coming to end (got just this one and one more to talk about the long-term future of Social CRM – next week).  Always happy to talk about what's coming – you know me, all about models and frameworks and visions and futures.

But first, shameless plug time... We are doing a webinar covering the material in all these posts; it is this Thursday, October 7th, at 11:00 AM EST.  You can sign up here.  Would love to have you there and discuss the content in this series in more detail.

Back to the clairvoyance business...

Social CRM is just beginning to be implemented, how can we talk about the future? Well, it is by focusing on what's coming that we can do a good job of planning and deploying the better today.  

Where is Social CRM headed in the near future?  In the next two to three years Social CRM will experience the following three phases:

1. Get Defined – no, I am no talking about restarting the war of the definitions, to me that is settled – Social CRM is likely to mean different things to different organizations, in the same way that CRM means different things to different organizations. However, we have a standard and accepted CRM definition (it is not just technology, has three core components, takes time to do well, etc.) that we use when we talk about managing the relationships with the customer. We also have them for other enterprise software applications—and we will get one for Social CRM.
2. Get Understood –We are going to start answering the key questions about Social CRM – not just the "what" of getting defined properly, but also the "how" to implement it properly; the "when" is the best time for any organization to adopt Social CRM; the "why" should be considered by the organization; the "where" in the organization the decisions and implementations reside; and the most important part – the "who" can help or "who" is responsible for the solution being deployed (hint: it is not a single person or group). This period will also allows us to start documenting recommendations, best practices, frameworks, and plans for Social CRM to answer those questions – repeatedly.
3. Get Adopted – In spite of the hype surrounding Social CRM today, there are fewer than five percent of organization that have adopted it and deployed it in their organization. Even that number may be too high for now. We define critical mass as the moment when an enterprise application moves from being used only by early adopters to being used by mainstream organizations. Critical mass is the moment when fast growth of the market ends (that explosive moment at the beginning akin to the Gold Rush of 1848 in San Francisco), and the market begins to get settled. Critical Mass is defined as around thirty percent of the potential market having deployed the solution. We shall reach Critical Mass for Social CRM towards the end of this two-to-three year period.

Sounds good?

Well, depends on who you are and what you are looking for.  In three years time, your organization will be able to follow a methodology to:

1. Prepare a Social CRM Strategy
2. Plan the Change Management for the shift in culture
3. Implement Business Process Management to supervise the changes in how functions get done
4. Select a vendor to help with the technology needs
5. Choose a Measurement Initiative to support Social Business, and
6. Embrace the necessary changes in Governance and Administration

In other words, you will have taken the first steps to becoming a Social Business – where Social CRM is just one more cog on the wheel.

Now you are asking – what comes after that? What happens after Critical Mass? Ah, that is when the fun starts.  And that is what we are going to cover next week in this space – and in the webinar on Thursday.

Are you ready?

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

 

4 Keys to Successfully Serving Customers with Social Tools and Strategies

TheSocialCustomer.com, in partnership with the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP), recently published the findings of a recent survey of customer service professionals on how their organizations are engaging customers on social networks – from a service and support perspective. The detailed results of The Social Customer Engagement Index can be downloaded for free (with registration) by using this link. 

Of the 118 customer service professionals taking the survey, 61% said efforts so far have had a positive impact, 36% said no noticeable impact has taken place, and only 3% said a negative impact has been felt. Analyzing the survey reveals a few factors that may help those involved in engaging customers on social networks improve their chances to positively impact customers, and their corporate initiatives for supporting them. 

Management Buy-In Makes a Difference

While understanding customer expectations with social engagement was one of the top challenges facing those surveyed, it was a challenge across the board. Determining ROI and defining key performance indicators also were common challenges to all. But having management buy-in for social initiatives seemed to be key to seeing positive impact being made. While 31% of all respondents cited management buy-in as a major challenge to their initiatives, only 12% of respondents seeing a very positive impact cited management buy-in as a challenge. This compares to 45% of those seeing no noticeable impact with social engagement, citing management buy-in as an issue.

Integrating Social Channels with Traditional Service Processes Pays Off

While 31% of all respondents said their companies have fully integrated social interactions into their customer support processes, the number spikes up to 40% for those who say their company has seen a positive impact from social engagement. That number jumps up to 48% for those seeing very positive results from social engagement. Conversely, only 19% of those seeing no noticeable impact from social engagement say their company has fully integrated it into their customer support processes.

A closer look finds that 24% of employees from large enterprises (over 1,000 employees) said their companies have already fully integrated social media/networks into their customer service processes. This compares with 43% of the small business respondents (under 50 employees) who say they've already integrated "social" into customer service processes. That's a sizeable difference which may be due to more complex processes and integration needs for the large enterprises, or possibly points to a difference in defining what "fully integrated" means to large and small organizations.

One Employee Can Make A Big Difference

The vast majority of respondents (79%) said that less that between 0-5 customer service professionals engage customers on social channels – 62% of which said 1-5 customer service employees. But where 17% of all respondents said they actually have zero customer service employees engaged, only 4% of those that answered "Very Positive" or "Positive" to the impact of social networks said they have no customer service professionals engaged. Contrast this to the number of respondents saying their company has seen no noticeable impact – 31% - and you see the importance of having a customer service professional (as opposed to marketing or PR) to engage customers.

One other point on this topic was included in the whitepaper. Ginger Conlon, Executive Director of 1to1 Media, identified that companies are in the process of integrating social channels into traditional service. This transition had led some companies to attempt to hire non-traditional service people to man social networks. One high-profile case was Pizza Hut’s hiring of interns to monitor customer requests on social networks. 

Hiring interns to handle the load is not a long-term solution. Incorporating experienced customer service professionals into the social strategy pays off for both the company, and the customer.

Facebook and Twitter Usage Makes a Difference As Well

Some very interesting insights came from looking at respondent answers to using specific social networks for customer engagement. While Facebook was most cited be those surveyed for customer engagement, both Facebook and Twitter ranked neck and neck for effective engagement overall. But, when looking at those who saw a very positive impact, 72% saw Twitter as being very effective - where 16% only saw Facebook that way. However when looking at those who saw "just" a positive impact, 57% of respondents said Facebook was very effective, where 40% said Twitter. 

While it seems odd to see the kind of variance between the "Very Positive" and "Positive" respondents when it comes to which social networks are more effective, the data shows that smaller organizations seem to be more comfortable describing their companies’ results with social as being very positive, where larger companies tend to stay with positive as their choice. This may explain why Twitter seems to be the choice of smaller organizations, while Facebook tends to be favored by larger companies.

Twenty-eight percent of those seeing a very positive impact (and 30% of those seeing a positive impact) cited using both Facebook and Twitter to engage customers. Those numbers compare to 17% of all respondents who use them both, but even more telling is that only 12% of those seeing no noticeable impact engages customer on both of the popular sites.

Brent Leary - Co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials LLC

Brent Leary is a crm industry analyst, advisor, author, speaker and award winning blogger. He is co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials LLC, an Atlanta based CRM advisory firm covering tools and strategies for improving business relationships. In 2009 he co-authored Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business.

Recognized by InsideCRM as one of the 25 most influential industry leaders, Leary also is a past recipient of CRM Magazine's Most Influential Leader Award. He serves on the national board of the CRM Association, and on the advisory board of the University of Toronto's newly created CRM Center of Excellence. He's been quoted in several national business publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Entrepreneur magazine. Leary writes the Social CRM column for Inc.com, and blogs at BrentLeary.com. You can reach him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/BrentLeary.

Note: Brent Leary has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

Success Stories for Social CRM

If you read my previous two entries on the need for Social CRM and how to plan a strategy for Social CRM you know that I am not a stickler for definitions and prefer to focus my writing on observations from real life.  I am going to do the same for Success Stories I have seen for Social CRM.

I am going to have to admit from the start: there are no success stories for Social CRM. However, before you start the hair-pulling and apocalypse talk, let me explain what I mean.

If you look at Social CRM as the intersection of Social and CRM (I know, quite simplistic) or even as the company's response to the rise of the Social Customer – the success of a Social CRM implementation is how well the organization can adapt an end-to-end CRM process to Social channels. That, we have not yet seen. We have seen organizations succeed at adapting or integrating Social Channels for specific CRM functions – but none that have adapted the use of Social channels across the CRM spectrum of functions.

However, focusing on Social CRM and expecting a success story from that this early in the game is naïve. Regardless of whom you read and believe CRM had no stories of successful deployments for at least five-to-twelve years after CRM was introduced.  Even today, we still see few end-to-end CRM success stories; most of them are single-function (sales, marketing, and customer service) and single-channel at best.

There is a modicum of Social CRM success if you are going to measure it as a single channel, single function implementation. Most of the well-advertised and known case studies: Ford doing Social Marketing for the Ford Fiesta's introduction; Dell using Twitter to implement social Sales; Comcast implementing Social Service via Twitter – are more focused on the successful use of the Social Channels than on the valuable data and analysis that may have accompanied deploying and managing Social interactions.

However, the success of Social CRM at this early stage is not to replicate CRM deployments via Social Channels and prove that they can work (some of them have, some of them haven't) but it is more about making Social CRM a recognized key system in the Social (r)evolution and the business march to becoming a Social Business.

Indeed adapting some of the CRM functions, even incompletely, to work in Social Channels is considered a success in this early stage, as in the following examples:

Social Service – Widgetbox leveraged the power of their community – realizing their customers were social media savvy, technical oriented, community-focused by seeing them share information with each other in other communities – and gave them the space to implement a focused community, took it one step further by integrating it with their helpdesk ticketing system. Not only did this help them to make sure that tickets that were closed were documented as such, but also gave customers an incentive to use that community versus an external one – their support cases could be tracked and accessed at any time. This also allowed Widgetbox agents and subject matter experts to participate in the community, fully knowing that their efforts were part of their commitment to their customers as well as their company.

Social Sales – Best Buy, often considered a case study for social service by leveraging their employees into a twitter-based support group called Twelpforce, recently stepped in one of the most complete and early example of crossing boundaries between CRM functions.  They noticed that when helping employees in their communities to find the right products, or to solve specific issues, they often had to recommend additional products, or a better solution, or even make a recommendation for someone looking to buy.  They extended their social service implementation to accommodate the ability to tap into their catalog, automate searching for specific recommendations, and automatically placing links to those products in the forums. They not only placed links to products, but also provided reviews, space for commentaries, and links to related products. By allowing their customers and consumers to not only get an answer, but find a link to the product that solved their problem increasing their sales and delivering extra support to the customer.

Social marketing – probably the most famous cases for social marketing can be ascribed to Groupon – a collective coupon model that brings the ability to do social marketing to small and mid-size organizations at the local level cheaply and efficiently.  Groupon signs up their own followers for a specific city, and offers them a daily coupon featuring a local business.  Customers get notified of new and exciting businesses every day, and the businesses get to spread the word cheaply and effectively.

The above are three simple cases to highlight what works in Social CRM: making sure that the new social channels are included as part of business.  There is no fast rule for success in Social CRM beyond that.  

Always remember, to ensure success – it is all about measuring and tracking the right data to show success.  

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

Key Elements of a Social CRM Strategy

I have been mulling this post for quite some time now as I did not want to turn it into another silly discussion on whether or not this is a "real" strategy, or even how to define strategy.  To cut that short – this is based on my experience and what worked for my customers in the past.

There are two camps when it comes to enterprise applications strategy.  First, there are the ones that say you cannot succeed without it, that you have to undertake it before you even consider implementing a solution and that without it, its not even possible to have a successful implementation (OK, there is always luck – but luck is not a strategy).

Second, you have those that say, "oh, just go ahead and do it – you can learn as you go and fix what is not working along the way."

Guess which one I am siding with on this one?  Yeah, you need a strategy.  No question about it...problem is, what is a strategy and how does it apply to Social CRM?

Excellent questions- let me see if I can help with the answer...

A strategy has four parts: Mission, Vision, Goals and Objectives.  

Let's explore it in some detail:

Mission – What business need are you trying to fulfill? Are you undertaking this project to generate more revenue? To save money? To generate goodwill and peace for humankind? That is your mission, which is the reason you are starting this project.

Vision – If you ever been to sales training, you know what a vision is: if I give you a magic wand (or a billion dollars or a magic genie) and you get to wish for the perfect solution, what does it look like? How does it work? Who works with it, and how do they benefit?  Your vision is no more than the end stage, what are you trying to accomplish?

Goals – What numbers you are going to show at the end? If your vision comes true, what is the numeric proof that you succeeded?  There is no place here for intangibles, feel good, vanity metrics or anything like it; we are talking hard core numbers.  We will see $1,000,000 more revenue.  We will save $150,000 per day.  Those are goals, the rest are objectives.

Objectives – Let's say that you have no way to generate numbers for your goals.  Or, there are several variables that you know are going to make the goals a guess at best.  There's got to be an end result to what you are setting out to do.  If the vision is the picture of how things are going to work, the objectives are the specific items you are going to accomplish by implementing the vision. We can reduce the time to process and make customers happier.  We can make it simple for customers to shop on our site and reduce the abandoned cart ratio.  These are objectives, which you will then turn into goals for your next iteration (when you have better metrics to benchmark).

How complex and detailed does it need to be? If you can simply produce the answers to the questions above, and make it a story that makes sense and can be executed, complexity and length of the answer does not matter.  Southwest's vision was put on a cocktail napkin and their business plan on two typewritten pages – now they are one of the most successful companies in the world.  It is not about complexity and length; it is about knowing what you want to do, and how you are going to know you did it.

Alas, this series is about SCRM – not about generalized business issues. So, let's focus the four items above to Social CRM (somewhat – always remember that Strategies are personalized and mileage definitely does vary – if you adopt the following examples as your strategy without changes, get ready for the failure that is coming your way).

Setting the four basic tenets of a Strategy for Social CRM goes something like this (the following is a very simple example, not your answer):

Mission – We are going to create a Social platform to allow our organization to interact better with customers, partners and consumers through social channels and enable us to get on the road to becoming a social business.

Vision – All the departments and business units in the organization will have the ability to use any social channel of their choice, for any purpose, and measure the performance of the same. The integration with existing systems will allow those same business units to make these social interactions part of their daily operations as they do today with any other channel.

Goals – We know that we lose close to $1,000,000 per year due to churn in our customer base from unsatisfied customers.  A recent survey showed that 30% of our customers are either dissatisfied or mildly satisfied with our social initiatives.  We expect that we can retain at least 50% of those unhappy customers by deploying a social platform (which should add to the bottom line).

Objectives – In addition to reducing the churn ratio we can use the higher satisfaction ratings and the improved customer service platform for social channels to attract more consumers and grow our customer base – however, we don't have sufficient data to quantify these claims yet.  We want to make sure we have a complete platform that allows our organization to be highly competitive in the market and can meet or exceed customers' expectations to facilitate the new customer acquisition and be able to properly measure and monitor those metrics.

What do you think? Have I oversimplified? Is this something you can do? Would love to hear what you have done, or any other method you use to set your strategy...let me know!

(This is part two of a five-part series I am writing with Jacada.  Check out the first post here)

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.