We're glad to announce the availability of the detailed survey results from our initial Social Customer Engagement Index. The whitepaper with the survey results is available for free by using this link to register for the download.
In June 2010 we invited members of the TSC community to take a few minutes of their time to share some their company's experiences engaging their customers via social channels - from a customer service perspective. We felt by having community members take a brief survey, we could gain valuable insight on how companies are using introducing social tools and strategies into their more traditional forms of customer support - to address the new demands of today's social customer.
The reason we decided to do a survey like this, was to help the TSC community members get a better understanding as to how their peers at other companies are utilizing social tools and strategies to engage customers from a support and service perspective. There are a great number of social media studies, but many of those are more targeted at the marketing and promotion areas. We wanted to focus this survey on understanding how customer service professionals are utilizing social tools to engage their customers in order to better serve them.
As you will see in the whitepaper, respondents who said their companies have been positively impacted by utilizing social channels had several things in common. Their companies had executive level support for engaging customers via social avenues. They've been doing so for longer periods of time than those who are newer to social networks. They have a higher percentage of customer interactions over social channels than the overall population of survey takers. Also, they have more fully integrated social channels into their traditional support processes.
And while social technologies are enabling these companies to see a positive impact from their initiatives, the most important success factor revolved around the human element. Not only are these companies integrating social with traditional processes, they are creating more effective processes that take advantage of our new methods of communication. More importantly, they understand the need to go beyond improving the experience customers have interacting with the company, by finding ways to improve the customer's life experience through these interactions.
This point was driven home to me by Lisa Larson, Director of Customer Care of Drugstore.com. She relayed to me how she personally interacts with customers online, and how those interactions helped her to have a much better understanding of what's important to them. Lisa also said how that better understanding led her to share experiences with customers that helped them with challenges they face - challenges she would not have understood without being a part of the conversations taking place.
Because of the survey results, and the impact of stories like Lisa Larson's, we wanted to include additional information and insight in the whitepaper. Included with the results is a great conversation with SAP's Mark Yolton on the important role corporate online communities are playing in support of today's social customer.
We also include great insights and perspectives from two of the industry's best writers and editors - 1to1 Media's Ginger Conlon and CRM Magazine's Josh Weinberger. They recently joined me for the 4th annual CRM Editors' Roundtable Conversation, and we're glad to include their opinions on the state of Social CRM, and on how organizations are (and should be) utilizing social strategies to engage their customers.
We believe this information - in addition to community blog posts, webinars and other whitepapers - will be valuable in helping our community move forward together in understanding and serving our customers better. And while 118 respondents doesn't sound like a large number, we feel that it's a great start and puts in place a solid foundation for us to move forward on a regular basis to provide the community with insights and information coming from customer service professionals charged with engaging customers utilizing the latest communication and collaboration tools.
With this being our first survey effort, we're still figuring out what kinds of questions will lead to the valuable insight that will help you, your company, and your customers form solid long lasting relationships. But we think there are some key pieces of information in this first effort that help us get off to a solid start.
As you go through the results in this document, please let us know what kinds of questions you think will add value to you and the other community members. We not only look to you to participate by taking the survey, but we also look to you for help making the survey more relevant to you and the rest of the TSC community.
Please use this link to get your copy of the whitepaper. Thank you for your continued support in growing TSC.