The unsettling thing about the conversation surrounding social support is that some companies think they have a choice whether or not to adopt it. Companies still trying to serve their customers in the old school ways depicted below are going to meet their cost saving goals...but it might be because they soon won't have many customers left to support.
Contrary to some perceptions, social support doesn't mean responding to customer service issues in 140 characters or less on Twitter. Rather, it means using social technologies to meet your customers wherever they're experiencing friction with your products and services online. A strong social support strategy is part mobile, part search, part social as we think of it today. It's comprised of listening, proactively identifying issues, and working with your customers in real time to solve them.
Get Satisfaction offers a kit to help companies mitigate the social support fails, and step into the modern customer support era. You can download it here. Warning, the cartoons below are meant to be funny. They are not meant to be models for how to do support in 2014.