Executive Summary
Global adoption of social media and mobile applications continues at an accelerated pace that challenges companies to develop a strategy for supporting the growing number of customers using newer channels for service requests. Although companies invest heavily in the creation of their social sites, they have limited visibility into all the activity that mentions, promotes or criticizes them. Currently, informal work teams provide most social customer support today, but they lack defined processes and access to customer data to accurately handle the high volume of social customer requests. To ensure successful customer engagements over social networking sites, companies must coordinate with existing customer support teams to define a strategy to deliver consistent cross-channel customer support. They must also develop new metrics to accurately measure their success in responding to social networking customers. Social business interactions will continue to soar and companies need to develop a plan immediately to meet this growing wave for customer engagements.