Utilising social technologies for customer service

Recently we’ve been conducting research into how some of the larger technology consultancies are packaging up enterprise-level social technology offers. This was in part prompted by the recent IBM Collaborate campaign which was advertised heavily amongst the US business press.

But more importantly, it was prompted by a growing realisation that we should be spending far more time at RMM thinking about the role of social technologies in assisting our clients’ customer service/experience business functions: activities around retention and improving customer lifetime value, for example.

To date, we’ve looked at the following companies’ offers: IBM, Infosys, Microsoft, SAP, Sogeti, Cubetree and Socialtext. Naturally our research has also led us to look at related propositions, such as Google Wave. We’d love to hear more about what any other players are doing.

I’ll share two initial conclusions to date (after the jump):

1. The bigger players seem to be spending a lot of marketing money saying very little about what their expensive enterprise systems will achieve for their clients and their clients’ customers. A case in point is below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_kGBScPuyw[/youtube]

This is IBM’s attempt to tell their clients how to “leverage social media” – a tad underwhelming, if I may be so bold. There’s definitely scope for some of the major players to be more open in describing their services – less buzz words, more detail on end benefits, (always) more case studies.

2. Although most of these enterprise services list one of the benefits as improving customer dialogue, their emphasis is quite clearly on facilitating B2B dialogue (typically amongst employees and key suppliers/partners), not in helping brands manage business-to-customer dialogue. I would assume this is due to their commercial approach to social technologies -  often designed around selling their clients walled-garden technology platforms that are commonly extensions of existing systems they’ve been sold in the past.

There seems to be a gap in the market for an enterprise system that enables a brand to manage its dialogue with its customers in the locations that its customers already commonly inhabit – from Facebook, to Twitter, from forums to review sites. This undoubtedly presents unique challenges – for example around issues such as data management, privacy and ethics.  And not least for the big technology consultancies in terms of how they would package and sell such a product.