Customer service is inherently social. When you take away all the bells and whistles, it is and always has simply been a conversation between a company and its customers.

Now that social media is a key location for social interaction in general, it follows that customer service inevitably has to have a presence there as well. In this case, what is popular is right, and it’s time to face it. There is a conversation happening about your company somewhere in the social realm (right now!), regardless of whether you have an official presence there. A lot of so-called “social media blunders” have actually been “customer service blunders” that gained traction as they were shared across social media channels. By not having an official social media presence, you’re letting other people lead the conversation about you. And with the unprecedented opportunities available to companies for listening to and interacting with audiences (especially with the added benefit that this can be tracked and measured), it’s hard to think of a reason not to take advantage of it.

That being said, I am a firm believer that a company’s social media presence should be relegated to the areas where it is the most congruent with the brand and its audience, rather than spreading it to every social media platform available just to “be there”. I wouldn’t go so far as to say proceed with caution – but do proceed with a strategy.

Without a solid strategy behind your social media presence, you risk damaging your company’s reputation rather than enhancing your relationships. The following characteristics of social media are those that present great opportunities for customer service – and potential pitfalls to avoid:

- It’s public. Beginning with the most basic level of involvement (all you have to do is watch and learn), there is already a huge opportunity presented here. One of the greatest advantages of social media is that you can now listen to your audience and instantly gather feedback. The world has suddenly become a free-form focus group for any company willing to take advantage of it.

Potential pitfall: Everyone else has the power to listen to you too, so make sure you mean what you say.

- It’s fast. Not only can you hear what is relevant now, but it grants the opportunity to react quickly as well.

Potential pitfall: If you miss an opportunity to act or react, that can also carry a lot of weight.

- It’s also where the action is happening. People are researching and actually purchasing your product in the same place that they are having conversations. Think of how much customer service there is surrounding the point of purchase in a brick-and-mortar store. This is to ensure that customers are getting helpful information that gears them toward a purchase, and so that they have a good experience to pass on. Social media now provides that same guidance to online shoppers.

Potential pitfall: There could be many competing sources of knowledge and opinions about you and your company – you need to make sure that a customer is hearing what you want them to hear, but you can’t control all of it.

- The ripple effect is exponential. Word of mouth has never been so loud. Due to the sheer number of people one individual can reach in a matter of seconds, good news travels fast.

Potential pitfall: Bad news travels faster.

- It’s entertaining. Content that is entertaining will be passed on simply for that factor, so it can transcend the normal niche of your market.

Potential pitfall: There are probably other people out there who are more entertaining than you are. (Even those of us who don’t own guitars know that United Airlines breaks them. And we can sing about it.)

- Social media is young. We’re just getting started, and the boundaries are constantly being pushed – by anyone. Mistakes have been and will continue to be made, but it’s liberating to know we’re not really held to any sort of tradition here. Instead, it’s all about getting out there and seeing what works. It’s exciting, and it’s fun to see the new ways that companies are interacting with their audiences.

Potential pitfall: Mistakes that are made happen in real-time, in front of an audience.

- It’s detached. The irony of social media is that it actually strips out a main component of social interaction – being physically present. This encourages very candid conversation that companies never had access to before.

Potential pitfall: Audiences are fickle and the detachment of social media can increase that because it decreases any consequences (or guilt) for moving on. It can grant the extra courage it might take to speak out negatively about something as well. What that means for a company is that you can quickly grab people’s attention, but you still have to have an overall strategy for customer satisfaction in order to keep them loyal.

Social media has proven to be a convenient and effective medium for interacting with your audience. However, as useful as it is, it should not be thought of as the big picture. The biggest pitfall to avoid is looking at social media as the entire customer service solution.

It’s important not to lose site of the fact that, beyond this, there are still human beings looking for a solution to a problem in a simple, personable way. How you address that overall depends on your personality, philosophy, and what you are willing to offer. Your social media presence should be built around and always be working to enhance that, but it should not be the only piece of the solution.

I encourage you to join the conversation that is happening out there in the social realm and use it to strengthen your customer service principles and your relationships. Just remember to “proceed with a strategy” and don’t risk letting the pitfalls get in the way of what you are trying to accomplish overall.

Molly Privratsky is the Support and Training Manager for eROI.

On the 6th of May voters took to the polling stations to elect their M.P.s. The result was one not seen in the UK since 1974; after all the campaigning, ‘Clegg-mania‘ and ‘bigotgate‘ the result was indecisive; a hung parliament.

Prior to the election, political and market analysts were either promoting the idea of a hung parliament giving good cause for electoral reform, or denouncing the result for fear that political uncertainty would have a negative impact on the economy.

So, we have had a good week to get our heads around the idea of David Cameron and Nick Clegg working together running the country. What do social media users think of the coalition? Do they express a positive or negative sentiment towards the current hung parliament?

Radian6′s automated sentiment analysis tool allows the user to survey and assess a large sample in real time or over a specific date range. The social media research that 6Consulting conducted covered posts between the 6th and 17th May. This immediately follows the hung parliament result and covers the period when the coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats was formed.

In terms of sentiment, over the monitored period there were more positive posts about the election result than negative ones. The chart below highlights the disparity between the two:

Figure 1: Sentiment expressed towards a hung parliament 6/05 - 17/05

4,397 posts were automatically analysed for sentiment towards a hung parliamnet:

• 64% were deemed to have a positive sentiment,
• 33% were deemed to have a negative sentiment.

There were over twice as many posts expressing a positive sentiment towards a hung parliament. Prior to the election, some traditional surveys had suggested that the public were evenly split in terms of sentiment towards a hung parliament. This changed following the result and when the coalition government was established.

What are these social media users saying? Word clouds highlight frequently used words in a selection of posts. Those expressing positive sentiment said:

Figure 2: Frequently used words in posts with a positive sentiment towards a hung parliament

We can also see the frequently used words included in posts with a negative sentiment towards a hung parliament:

Figure 3: Frequently used words in posts with a negative sentiment towards a hung parliament

A word which stands out in posts with negative sentiment is ‘uncertainty‘. This was a major concern for market analysts prior to the election, but is not such a large issue for social media users following the result.

Where in social media have people been discussing the hung parliament? Blogs were the most dominant hosting platform, closely followed by micro media (predominantly Twitter).

Figure 4: Popular media types for hung parliament discussion

The media types are quite varied; blogs and micro media are at opposite ends of the social media spectrum. Where blogs allow for the author to express their view at great length and detail, Twitter is restricted to 140 characters. So while social media users were making short, passing comments about the prospect of a hung parliament, they were also composing longer tracts on the situation.

Social media played a positive role in the election, being a place where the public could comment on and discuss aspects and events throughout the campaigns. Moving forward, social media users remain interested in the result, closely following where the new coalition government will take the country next.

David Barber

Data Analyst at 6Consulting.

Twitter: @davidbarber6c

Massing large amounts of fans or followers is pointless if you cannot service your current community or entice them to remain interested and have ongoing engagement with your organization. Your company must be just as smart and strategic about your online participation as it is about traditional customer service and offline engagement channels. While online behavior is not indicative of your entire customer base, any insights your organization can add to its existing customer database, will enrich analysis of trends and purchase behaviors that will help your organization better connect with existing customers.

Begin reactivating and retaining customers through social media channels with these three steps:

1. Relevance: Maintaining customers and propelling them to have repeat interactions with your company is more science than art. Those catchy phrases and colors on marketing materials may intrigue a customer, but do not always incite action. Great marketing must partner with an organization’s personal touch. Begin by looking for seasonal trends in the activity of existing customers on the social web. Where is the buzz focused? What are the triggers? Identify behavior patterns and integrate these insights into your reactivation planning to get the right balance of customer segmentation and presentation.

2. Participation: Ask for feedback. Who doesn’t want to be asked their opinion? Inquire about the activity of your customers on social media channels while determining the strength of their brand affiliation. If you have a traditional customer database, match up your survey results with existing customer profiles and develop communication and marketing strategies based on a deeper dive into those customer buying behaviors.

3. Rinse and Repeat: So often, organizations build metrics to measure data at an overall level for use in driving larger business decisions while deeper analytics are not being used to maintain current customers or define and bring back dormant customers. One contact is not enough. Test different combinations of insights gleaned from observed social media channel trends and survey results to find out what motivates your customers. The right solution arises when you interact with the right customers at the right time.

What is your company doing to maintain or reactivate customers on the social web? Is your company tracking this engagement using CRM processes and tools? Please share your experiences with each other.

For all the talk about social-media-for-customer-service case studies, the very basic question of, “OK, so how could this work for my business?” often remains unanswered. Jumping on Twitter and beginning to answer questions may seem like a great thing to do, but there is a necessary amount of thought and planning that must happen before most businesses can successfully take that leap.

Review

Before an online response strategy can be created, the people involved in the process need to have a firm grip on current policies and procedures, ongoing initiatives, reporting practices and personnel, among other things. Take a moment and look at what is current going on. How do you field calls? What about product inquiries that result from support calls? How are support cases escalated? What are your teams measured on? Who is the head honcho in charge and who do they share their progress with? How do you train your employees? What are your turnover rates?

These questions are a great start to getting the current lay of the land, and a necessary precursor to defining your online response strategy.

1 – Consistency

In order for an online response strategy to ultimately be successful, it has to tie in with your other response outlets (phone, email, snail mail, etc). Take a good look at what your current response strategies are. What practices are consistent across the mediums? Can these practices be put into place for your online responses, or do they need to be modified? Who needs to sign off on the changes? What legal or regulatory concerns are involved (if any)?

An online response strategy isn’t a silo’d entity just because it’s online. It has to not only tie in to, but support and reinforce your other methods of response. If it doesn’t, you run the risk of duplicated efforts, or different messages reaching the same customer and causing confusion.

2 – Tool Identification

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be everywhere online, but you do need to be active in places where it makes sense for your business. Your online response strategy should clearly state the tools you’ve identified as important to your business, and the identification should be based off real-world research, not just “what’s popular”. Forums are still a very popular place for support inquiries (I posted in one last week, in fact), though your membership may only return when they’re having problems. If your user base isn’t on Twitter, you may prioritize creating an online support presence there far lower than another business would, and choose to spend your time elsewhere. There is no “one size fits all” right answer, as ultimately, it depends on your business and your customers. The right answer is one that allows your support teams to reach customers where they already exist.

3 – Escalation Chain

Online response strategies should still include an escalation chain. Responding to someone asking a question on Twitter doesn’t mean that their question won’t require manager input, so be prepared to escalate their questions up the chain of command just like you would if they called your support center.

Depending on your business, you might need multiple escalation documents. A company I previously worked for segmented out their customers (wholesale/resale, partner, etc.) and delivered each user group their own unique escalation chain based on their needs and the support members most able to answer their questions.

4 – Integrated Reporting

This may sound fancy, but the question is simple. How are you going to use your existing systems to capture this new support data? Can you tie your CRM system to inquiries that come through via Twitter, for example? How can you provide clarity around what you’re doing (and where you’re providing the support) and measure your online responses?

If you’ve done your background work, you’ve already set measurable objectives, which will guide your online response strategies. From these strategies, drill down and decide which metrics you’ll use to measure your success. Do these line up where possible with other mediums? Do they support information presented in other reports, such as call volume?

A Word About Engagement Guidelines

Your online response strategy should line up with your pre-set engagement guidelines and provide a consistent voice no matter the medium. In addition, though, your strategies should also note when conversations should be moved from one response tool to another — say, from Twitter to email. It’s likely that your online response strategies will require your engagement guidelines to be tweaked in some areas, and that’s completely OK. This isn’t a one-way street, and for most companies you’ll be breaking new ground when developing these strategies and working down to your tactics. Your guidelines should support this new ground. Evolution is good!

What have I missed? The comments are yours to add thoughts, questions, and examples!

As a community team, we have a rather methodical approach to how we connect with and engage with our customers online. We refer to all of these conversations as “answering the social phone”, and we approach our engagement with that in mind. There are several pieces to that, including how we organize our process and workflow, and the most important piece: our intent.

The Listening Grid

At Radian6, we have set up what we call a “listening grid”, or a system for capturing, routing, and responding to posts – answering the Social Phone – that helps us scale our engagement across the organization.

Genevieve is our community analyst, and she’s the one that mans the front lines to capture Radian6-related discussions as they occur. Using the Engagement Console, Gen sorts through the posts and for each one, determines:

• Whether or not it requires engagement or response
• If it does, who the appropriate team member is to deal with it
• How we tag, classify, and otherwise add metadata to each post for tracking and reporting

If it’s someone interested in Radian6 or a demo, she’ll make sure they get to the sales folks. A support issue? She’ll make sure our support team gets connected immediately. And if it’s a tweet or a blog post that encourages some conversation and connection from our community team, she’ll send it out to me, David, Lauren, or Katie for comment or engagement.

And all the while, as she classifies and routes posts based on that criteria, she’s entering data into our system that will help us report on and analyze that activity later on to gauge our success. We’re always tweaking and refining this process, and our goal is to serve as a model for how other companies can extend listening and engagement across their organizations.

Scaling Engagement

Our team has a coverage calendar during the day to be sure that someone is always checking our alerts during business hours. We don’t have “official” after hours coverage, but members of our team are usually knocking around online in the evenings so we cover response and engagement on a more ad-hoc basis during those hours (our support channel on Twitter has specific hours posted to avoid confusion).

We can tell who is online in the Engagement Console, and during the day, Gen routes posts to folks based on their a) area of market focus (agency, corporate marcom, CRM/consumer affairs, etc) b) who might be the right personality and interest “fit” for the discussion, and for more generalized discussions, c) a rotation of those who are available and online. Particular topics and mentions get handled by different members of the team, or even sometimes executives or folks in other areas of the business if they’re best suited.

We’ve also assembled a Radian6 Playbook that outlines specifics on things like workflow, procedures and protocol, response guidelines, and the like. That way, our entire team can work from the same sheet music and expectations, and new members of our team have great guiderails within which to learn the ropes and join in seamlessly.

Above Our Brand

We’re also working hard to take our engagement beyond just Radian6-specific discussion, and into the industry topics and verticals that represent the companies we serve.

For example, our team members are doing proactive listening for subjects in and around relevant industries. We’re all listening to the larger social media discussions around monitoring, measurement, metrics, community, engagement, and enterprise applications (including what our customers and competitors are all talking about.)

Katie is paying close attention to how social media is impacting traditional corporate marketing and communication functions. Lauren is listening for conversations around social CRM, consumer affairs, and she’s also working with some higher ed programs that are exploring social media. Teresa is paying attention to how content marketing is impacting business, and what consistent social media topics might make for informative content projects on our end. Our new agency community manager will keep in touch with that community and their conversations. And I’m paying close attention to discussions about integrating social media across businesses beyond just marketing and PR.

Each of us is keeping our finger on the pulse of some broader searches to find conversations each day that we can contribute to and participate in. Our purpose isn’t to sell anything or pitch our product, but to be there to listen, absorb, learn, and contribute expertise when we can. Paying attention to what’s happening around our brand is critical to us understanding how our company and industry fit into the bigger picture.

Attitude and Intent

The most important part of our engagement is the intent, or the approach we take to connecting with our community online. None of the process is worth a fig if we’re not there for the right reasons in the first place.

First of all, we seek to be helpful. Whether it’s a specific Radian6 question or a more general social media discussion, we want to get people the information they need when they need it. That’s why our immediate product questions, troubleshooting, or inquiries are always the first things we address, because that’s what we’re here for, first and foremost.

We’re also here to help educate and empower businesses about social media, which is where the “above our brand” discussions come into play. Whether it’s contributing our expertise in a blog comment or creating content and events to help people expand their knowledge of social media for business, our community team is here to engage and participate and share what we know. We believe it’s critical for us to participate in discussions that are about more than just our company, but about the business challenges and interest areas that are important to our customers and prospects.

And of course, we’re here to learn. We’re eager to always absorb how the social web is changing and challenging businesses as a whole, how our customers and potential customers want and need to take advantage of its potential, and how the community perceives and values Radian6 as a company. We want to demonstrate that we’re invested in the very communities we hope to build.

We believe that Radian6 not only has the opportunity to help companies recognize this shift, but to empower them with the business intelligence, tools, and ideas to make the transition themselves from both a cultural and operational perspective. So when we’re engaging in social media, we’re always keeping these goals in mind, and using them to shape our interactions and priorities.

So that’s a bit about how we approach listening and engagement with our team. What other questions do you have? How are you handling that part of your business? We’d love to chat more with you in the comments.

image credit: Seattle Municipal Archives

We’re continually listening for feedback from our community, and we work hard to make sure the requests and suggestions you send us are thoroughly considered and worked into our game plan when possible. Some of those requests take a bit more time to fulfill, but there are a few we can put into action fairly quickly — like making our monthly eBooks available to you in eReader format.

We’ve created both .ePub and .mobi files of May’s eBook, which are readable on most eReaders and eReader applications. Of course, we’ll have an eye out for growing popularity in additional file types, but we’ll be sticking with these two file formats for the foreseeable future.

The formatting isn’t perfect (yet), but the content is there and is now as portable as you need it to be. Read it on your own time and let us know what you think; we want to hear from you.

.Mobi file of May’s ebook

.ePub file of May’s ebook

If actions speak louder than words, then it’s no surprise that customer service is playing a larger and larger role in peoples’ buying decisions. Today’s marketplace is packed with redundant products and services, so we turn to big-picture differentiators, like brand reputation and buying experience, to help us make purchasing decisions. This is also part of why we talk to our friends and networks about their experiences with a brand or product, and share our own experiences, as well.

Before the Internet, though, we’d tell a few friends about our fantastic or horrible experience with a brand, and they’d tell a few people, and eventually it would fizzle out, probably not having reached more than 20 people by the time the conversation died. But now, if we have a great (or equally bad) experience, we can share that experience in a blog post, a blog comment, a tweet, a video, a Facebook status update, and on and on, and that commentary could potentially be seen and shared by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people.

That kind of mass exposure has a definitive impact on brand reputation and, ultimately, sales.

Now that your customers can have such a huge voice in the marketplace, it stands to reason that they need to be handled with a bit more care than the traditional customer service model allows. In the best case, that fantastic care you give will make your customers champions for your brand.

Customer Service is More Than a Department

Companies such as Zappos and L.L. Bean are known for their customer-focused business models. Everything they do, from pre-transaction to post-transaction is focused on making sure the customer experience is as high-quality as possible. Customer service for these companies is not just a department, it’s an important part of the corporate culture.

In these instances, because the customer service mindset lives outside the walls of a single department, the job of every employee to a certain extent is to speak on behalf of the customer. Internal and external conversations, marketing collateral, and larger business initiatives take into consideration the customer, making the entire system more inviting, personal, and people-friendly.

The Marketing Angle

At the end of the day, your business relies on relationships. People choose to buy from you because they like the relationship opportunity your brand presents — it feels good to them — and they come back because they get satisfaction from that relationship they’ve built with you. You’ve solved a problem of theirs and done it in a way that fits them.

To that end, strong relationships will always be talked about, be they with another person, a company, a product, or a service. We share the experiences we have in our relationships with others as a way to connect and relate, and the more extreme the experience (good or bad) the more it will get talked about.

Simply, if you provide top-notch customer service, people will talk about you. They’ll tell others about how well they were treated in your care, what they thought of your product or service, and if they’ll be going back to you for future purchases. With such good word being spread, others will be interested in your products and services, and they’ll seek you out, too.

Creating a positive and personal customer experience is a fantastic way to get people referring their friends, family, and larger networks to your company. The personal reference has power, and it’s one of the strongest marketing tools a brand can work to develop.

How are you improving customer service inside the walls of your company? How do you think those improvements will impact the way your customers, prospects, and community talk about you?

There’s nothing quite like tax time to set people on edge; not only do we potentially have to shell out money to our government, but it’s a slightly nerve-wracking process making sure our paperwork is filled out and filed properly (let alone figuring out what tax laws apply to us).

We all feel the pain of taxes, and H&R Block, one of the world’s largest tax preparation services, is poised to ease some of that pain by offering up the expertise of their tax advisors to the greater online community. But how do you mobilize thousands of experts to get chatting in such a highly regulated industry? It may not be an easy feat, but Director of Social Media Zena Weist and her team are happy to take on this challenge.

The Mission

H&R Block’s goals for social media engagement are simple: Field and answer product inquiries and company-specific questions, and contribute expertise and advice to the larger online community discussion regarding all things tax prep. Unsurprisingly, the simplicity of those goals understates the work it’ll take to achieve them.

Already headed down the social road, H&R Block has established a community called the Get It Right Community, where people can post questions and get advice from one of the company’s many tax advisors. Thousands of people have already joined, but not all tax-related questions and comments are asked within these community walls; a good portion of the larger conversation lives outside the H&R Block community on a variety of touch points that need to be monitored regularly.

Weist and team have been tasked with finding these separate conversations happening outside the H&R Block community, observing the trends of those conversations, and creating a strategy to get involved on a company-wide scale.

How Are They Scaling?

With hundreds of field offices and thousands of employees, how does a company this big scale social media outreach? Weist’s team was created and is structured to thread together all the various-company based activity on the social web, and keep things as organized and cohesive as possible. To get analogous, H&R Block’s social media team is the hub for the company’s social web initiatives, and the various offices and employees involved are the spokes.

The H&R Block social media team consists of four people, including Weist, who oversee the company’s Get It Right Community, own and manage its various social media outposts and partner initiatives, make sure the content H&R Block produces is fresh and relevant to the overarching online conversation, and work to establish a more social form of customer service.

Because of its fairly small size, the social media team at H&R Block relies heavily on its internal partners, and on the unusual but celebration-worthy buy-in from company executives. To some degree, that corporate buy-in and organization-wide enthusiasm for using social media to share company expertise make it easier to keep the hub small and still remain effective.

Why Radian6?

Weist emphasizes that the long-term goal for H&R Block is to shift from a reactive response effort to a proactive one in which they’ll be able to anticipate and answer questions before people run into serious issues that get them nervous or upset. Taking into consideration this long-term goal, Radian6’s trend analysis capabilities and workflow functionality make the platform a perfect fit for H&R Block’s purposes.

The Engagement Console will also be an integral piece of H&R Block’s monitoring and engagement strategy, as the company’s customer service team will be able to tag, assign, and respond to comments and questions around the web quickly and without confusion to keep conversations moving. With the Engagement Console, the executive team will be able to review online content relevant to them without having to get heavily involved in the nitty gritty of sifting through posts or managing responses.

What’s Next?

Because H&R Block is in a heavily regulated industry, the company can only do so much with the social graph information they’ll have access to from their online interactions. Working within these regulations makes future planning for these channels limited until tax laws change, but that won’t keep H&R Block from doing all it can to optimize its use of the social web to help people and build brand reputation.

While Weist and team have quite the task list to manage in the months to come, they have a winning combination of support from their organization and the drive to be the go-to resource for tax preparation, both on- and offline.

In a recent poll by the TSIA of firms using social media, 68% of companies said they don’t know or can’t measure the ROI of social media. That’s a real shame, and if that’s the case for you, I would argue that you are focusing your social media efforts in the wrong place.

There are certainly tools out there to help you measure your efforts in social media, but sometimes it’s not the tool’s fault, it’s the business case.

Many people take a classic approach to social media and treat it like just another media channel, expecting to see instant results like they do with other online media such as banners, text links, and search. This is why they find it hard to see results that make for a strong ROI.

In the case of social customer support, I would argue that this is the single best place to focus your social media efforts, since it can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program we have ever seen before. Spotting a customer issue, responding to it, and solving the problem in minutes using social media provides what can only be called an exceptional customer experience.

In fact, a recent Forrester study shows that customers actually prefer a better customer experience compared to everyday low prices, and, moreover, great customer experiences drive positive word of mouth (WOM). So why wouldn’t you center you social media efforts in this area?

Layering on social media tactics for support can also decrease your contact center costs. Tactics like providing free support forums, peer-to-peer collaboration and discussion threads on social networks, and support through microblogging can act as a string of defense before a person calls you’re your contact center (which is the highest cost support vehicle any company can have).

Not everyone enjoys calling into a contact center and, as social media evolves, people will expect to be able to get support through the channels they prefer and feels most comfortable using.

The downside of poor customer service has been well documented on the web, and more and more people are taking to the web to warn other would-be customers of their dissatisfaction. Don’t let that be your company! Great customer service enabled by social media is a no-brainier, and it is the single best place to build your business case for social media.

—-

Paul Dunay is Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing for Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communications, author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley 2009) and Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies. His unique approach to integrated marketing has produced significant revenue and cost-savings for Avaya, and has led to his recognition as a BtoB Magazine Top 25 B2B Marketer of the Year for 2009 and winner of the DemandGen Award for Utilizing Marketing Automation to Fuel Corporate Growth in 2008.

How’d April treat you? Did you get all you needed from us last month to get started creating some serious change in your organization? As always, if you want more, let us know — take a browse through the April ebook again, and let us know if you’ve got any questions or would like some deeper explanations of the concepts we covered.

This month we’re tackling customer service in this era of social technologies and heightened connectivity, talking about everything from creating a strategy for finding and responding to customer inquiries and comments online to identifying exactly how your customer service initiatives are creating or taking away from word-of-mouth response.

Here at Radian6, we often talk about how important it is for companies to “answer the social phone”, and hopefully the content we produce this month will detail exactly what we mean by that and why we put such emphasis on companies being aware of the comments and questions being posed about them online and taking steps to respond to them.

This month’s ebook also focuses on customer service, discussing some of the beginning steps you can take to get back to a customer-centric service and business model.

Unlike previous times, people have access to such incredibly high volumes of information and opinions these days that companies must work much harder to capture the attention of their target audience, and go above and beyond in every customer-facing touch point of their business to actually make a sale. If you consider that businesses thrive most not from one-time sales but from loyal customer patronage, companies have more work to do than ever to make even a small impact on customer buying decisions.

We want to help carry some of that workload by helping you figure out where deficiencies might be hiding in your customer service initiatives, what you can do on a social level to balance out those deficiencies, and what tools you’ll need to do that.

Have stories about how socializing your customer-facing departments has benefited your company and improved its bottom line? Please share. The real-life successes are what grounds us and gets us seeing the true value, instead of the possibilities of abstract concepts. And, of course, if you’ve got questions, just give us a shout.

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Customer Service is a bit of a hot button issue these days. Along with conversations, engagement, and all those other trends, social customer service is receiving its time in the spotlight because, well, there’s real value in integrating more social elements into your customer service model. And by social elements we don’t mean every social technology and online engagement platform you can get your hands on; in many instances, social elements are a shopping-friendly website or a more communicative and helpful call center.

All variety of companies, big and small, have lost their footing with the buying public, because the buying public doesn’t trust brands anymore. People have been pushed upon and are now equipped with the means to find the information they need about products and services without the help of the companies that produce those products and services.

This shifting customer landscape can be difficult to adjust to, and even tougher to weave into your customer service models. How do you change years of engrained processes? How do you convince people that investing time and money into these new strategies, tactics, and tools will pay off?

We’re taking the month of May to help answer those questions for you and give you some support and ideas for why these social pieces can’t be ignored and how to get started incorporating them into your customer service mix.

This month’s ebook focuses on how you can get started creating a more customer-centric culture that appeals to your customer, prospect, and community audiences and gets them turning to you as well as their networks for help making buying decisions.

As always, we hope you use this content as a creative engine to help spark ideas for ways these social philosophies can be put to use in the context of your business. And if you’ve got questions that live under the umbrella of social customer service and relationship management, let us know! We’re here to help.

Being steeped in the social media monitoring space, we’re huge advocates of listening to what people are saying about you online — whether they’re directing comments at you or just thinking “outloud” — and acting on what you’ve heard to positively impact your business and its community. Sometimes, though, taking a more openly proactive approach and asking your audience what they need and want from you is just as valuable.

In the spirit of practicing what we preach, we want to hear from you – what do you want to learn from us? What burning questions regarding all things social media, social business, measurement, monitoring, and engagement do you have that we can help answer?

This blog is yours, as are all the educational resources we provide. And while we love coming up with our own ideas for content and sharing what we think is important information for you to know, the only way this place can really be valuable is if you help shape it, as well.

Share with us what you’re ready to learn, will you?