Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Thirty Percent of Companies Will Use Social CRM for Customer Service in Two Years

By Rajani Baburajan
TMCnet Contributor

About 30 percent of companies will use social customer relationship management (CRM) to extend their online community initiatives in the next two years, according to Gartner, an independent information technology research firm.

The ability of Social CRM to bring dynamic methods for improving customer service will create opportunities for new and existing providers in the customer service and contact center infrastructure markets.

“Social CRM for customer service has only recently entered into the realm of contact center infrastructure and customer service software components, where it has been met with significant hype despite a limited number of field deployments,” said Drew Kraus, research vice president at Gartner (News - Alert), in a statement.

According to Kraus, in 2010, only 5 percent of organizations took advantage of social/collaborative customer action to improve service processes.

Social networks and social CRM for customer service will see strong and wide adoption from early adopter to mainstream deployments despite the volatile and rapid evolution of social networks.

Customer service executives and business development planners are under pressure from corporate executives to chart out a strategy for how this new communication channel will be utilized.  

According to Gartner, most social CRM deployments are taking place in corporate marketing departments as a brand management exercise. Social CRM, in coming years, will progress from an exception-handling situation to a process that needs to be standardized to scale.

Social CRM for customer service faces significant adoption hurdles. The lack of broad-scale adoption of the technology makes the business case more theoretical than proven, the research agency said.

According to Gartner, social CRM for customer service is still in the early stages of adoption. Many contact centers and late-adopter companies struggle for budget and focus their efforts on streamlining their present operations.

Recently, Gartner said social media has become an inescapable fact of life in the past five years and more frequently businesses are incorporating it into their overall strategy. The report said social media’s penetration will change the CRM landscape in the years immediately following 2011.