UPDATED!
Over the past year or so there’s been a lot of growth in the social media customer service area. It’s all about customer retention and reputation management. Turning your social media presence into true customer focused content and services means making your customer service there just as robust as it would be at your hotline phone number. We recently completed a project with an Asian mileage program to do just this – setting up and training social media teams from marcomms to call center.
There are a number of tools on the market you can use to coordinate, answer and report on customer inquiries in the social media space. We’ve seen groups like Salesforce suck up small shining stars like desk.com to add to its existing tools (time will tell if this move simply stops innovation or creates real improvements in their offering) while leaders like Zendesk continue to do great work. If you’re looking to do more advocate style communities with a self-service focus, think about community based tools.
The international tools don’t serve China though so you’ll be looking for a stand alone tool and the only real competitor is CIC who’ve added to their existing monitoring / analytics abilities with IWOM Cooperator.
Note: Most of these tools can be used off the rack but for real integration with CRM systems etc., you’ll need development support.
Download the full comparison chart to get the skinny on pricing, implementation difficulty rating, and features overview. Get in touch to discuss your social service plans: taura.edgar@digitaldevotee.com
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| SERVICE FOCUSED TOOLS | |
| Summary | |
| Zendesk | Leader in social media customer service arena with long history and robust tools for enterprise clients. |
| Desk | Strong social media customer service player best for small to medium clients with good integration to the Salesforce dashboard. |
| Service Cloud | Enterprise level customer servicing tool that integrates with other Salesforce tools for optimizing sales leads.Note: Their structure makes it hard to buy bundled services smoothly. Expect long sales/implementation periods with many extra costs. |
| IWOM Cooperator (beta) | Established monitoring group in China added social servicing tool with Fortune 500 clients trialling. Tool also allows publishing to multiple accounts. Major update to functionality scheduled for May 2013 |
| COMMUNITY SUPPORT FOCUSED PLATFORMS | |
| Summary | |
| Telligent | Advanced community platform started with external forums and now offeres internal also for self help, social communities. Recently partnered with SoCoCare for social customer service. |
| Lithium | Dynamic social customer experience company with community platform and good social servicing tools plus advanced advocacy / support tools. |
| Jive |
Large social business company started with internal communities and now offers external customer service and peer-based support communities, call deflection and team collaboration capabilities. |
More Reading //
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social CRM
