We at Social Yantra wish all of you a happy and prosperous new year. The coming year provides a lot of opportunities to us as well as you our customers. As the new year begins, I have the following thoughts on how it might evolve and what could be ahead for all of us.

• 2011 will be the year when a significant number of businesses in US will start looking into Social CRM for various processes such as marketing and customer service beyond listening and monitoring the social media. This has already been predicted by a number of people and I am simply restating it.
• Customers who are on various social networks will adjust themselves to privacy concerns and continue to interact with each other and the businesses they 'Like'. They also see an opportunity to provide direction as a collective mass similar to what they have done during WikiLeaks issue with PayPal and Amazon. It wasn't very easy to understand how clearly the division happened among consumers (pro vs against) for these issues but overall effect for companies such as Amazon and PayPal was too much noise impacting crucial holiday selling season.
• As devices such as iPad and Kindle (and Nook) and other plethora of tablets/devices come into market, the touch points for customer service will continue to rise, though many businesses may not take those devices into consideration when they either detect the interaction or when they deliver service back to the consumers. This will be a hot trend as we go to 2012.
• Businesses will continue to look for help in understanding what they can do and how they can succeed in the social area taking help from various providers both technology and/or professional services.
• Businesses will continue to push community supported service as a front-line service instead of contact centers. However, doing this needs be very customer friendly and useful way rather than appearing to be getting rid of customer calls from their contact centers.
• Self-service and knowledge base of topics that can enable self-service will continue to grow as companies will implement these technologies for the benefit of both customers and businesses.

I have one question for all of you. How do you see 2011 evolving with respect to how you connect, communicate, and engage with businesses you 'Like'?

Regards,

-Srinivas Penumaka

CEO, Co-Founder - Social Yantra

Follow us at @socialyantra, facebook.com/socialyantra