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It’s been an interesting week further exploring the topic of Social Networking and Customer Service. Having a background in database, BI and now search technologies, I have been through my fair share of hype cycles, so am working on getting a better sense of the current state of the application and technology space. It is little surprise that Gartner places Social CRM: Customer Service at the peak of the hype cycle for Social Software (2009) with 2 to 5 years lead time to mainstream adoption and the related Social CRM: Community Marketing as on the rise with 5 – 10 years to mainstream adoption.

There is certainly no shortage of debate on the definition, scope and relative viability of social CRM (SCRM). Check out Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad? by Bob Thompson, for a recent opinion and some cross references to others’ thoughts. It’s clear that interest and momentum is high but plenty of room remains for clarification. I for one would like to see more in the way of reference use cases across CRM and adjacent functions to better understand processes, data usage and interdependencies. I just can’t imagine adoption hitting stride until companies can see how functional pieces and related data need fit together. All you have to do is take a look at Gartner’s rather crowded Social Software hype cycle to get a sense of potential process and data overlaps and the accompanying urge to tap the breaks a bit. Paul Greenberg, a regular contributor to ZDNet, promises more discussion on related business models and strategies..

We see that companies are beginning to get a sense of the social conversations that are taking place about their products and services. A subset of those companies is having direct conversations with customers through social media channels. For example, one of my good friends does PR for a video game company and is crushed by the need to address misinformation, negative sentiment and bring some control to the conversation about his clients. We look forward to going beyond the hype – seeing more use cases of how companies are really building the processes and technologies around social CRM.

At Exalead, we’re working on Social CRM related technologies. Constellations is an Exalead Labs experiment that looks at connections between people and between web sites. It presents a graph of related web sites or people.  The experiment is built upon our web index. The approach to relating people and things is flexible and can be based upon a configurable set of factors.

At Exalead, we are now seeing uses for search-based applications (SBAs) across many different industry sectors and enterprise departments. SBAs that have been a hot bed for Exalead are customer service-oriented applications. Recent Exalead customers have implemented SBAs within Contact Centers and also for direct use by customers (customer self-service applications).

With that in mind, I recently came across a blog on the movement of customer service towards the use of social media. Linda Evans’ entry on “Customer Service in Social Media” in particular comes to mind. What really resonates with me is the importance of companies monitoring their name in the social media space in order to be fully engaged with their customer base. It seems that the underlying challenge is how to be fully tapped in. Indeed, having a customer service Twitter channel makes a lot of sense, as does a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But what about the next popular channel and the next … And, how in the context of customer service, does this get pulled together as a full and cohesive view of and conversation with the customer?

Well, yes, I do have an opinion on this, and now it’s even stronger.  To maintain a 360-degree view of the company as well as its customers and competitors, channel searching needs to be both adaptive and efficient. To be truly meaningful, the result of channel searching also needs to be up-to-date and presented in a unified fashion that makes sense. Search technologies are key to enabling a company’s customer service strategy and infrastructure to adaptively find, tap into and assimilate all sources of relevant information—including social media.

First of all, thanks to Bill Ives for his post about Exalead and Search-Based Applications (SBAs).

In my discussions with Bill and others, I’ve heard a consistent refrain that an essential element of SBAs is that they enable an immediate action as opposed to providing more content for research. As Bill points out in his post, there is a compelling business case for making decisions with speedy access to as much relevant data as possible. This is exactly what SBAs allow business users to do.

An illustrative example would be our partner, the vdR group, who is using Exalead CloudView OEM to create SBAs for engineering and manufacturing organizations. Their product, Partrieve, enables engineers to locate specifications and designs for re-use in new projects. Simply put, Partrieve empowers vdR’s customers to be more efficient, to lower manufacturing costs and, ultimately, to improve profitability. It’s not a big jump from this example to say that SBAs in general empower people (and, by extension, businesses) to do their work more efficiently and creatively…and isn’t this an essential cornerstone of search technology?

As with any tool, however, the trick is in making the right design decisions so that its strengths are in line with the needs it is built to address. Based on our experience with applications we’ve helped develop and deploy, we see three unique, SBA-specific categories of capability: Usability, Agility and Performance.

• Because SBAs generally serve thousands or even millions of users, they need to be immediately usable and useful, without requiring extensive training (read: without being a time suck).
• In today’s fluid, rapidly evolving world, SBAs need to be eminently adaptable to proprietary, changing business practices and to evolving information needs.
• Given the large amounts of information that are often sourced, the high activity of user communities and the need to constantly update information in real time, unwavering performance levels – at an affordable cost – is a critical must.

Though these broad requirements are consistent across businesses and industries, the specific needs of any given organization are unique and likely to change over time. This is why a “one-size-fits-all” approach to search is dangerous. In every industry, tools are the quintessential means of improving productivity, but these tools need to be specially designed and customizable to achieve tailored results and provide the desired and user-demanded differentiation. So, we think there will be a ‘long-tail’ of SBAs alongside general-purpose search tools from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft just as there are special purpose tools for producing today’s wide spectrum of products and materials.

The result is that every organization will be able to reap the decision-making benefits of an SBA that is right-sized to meet their needs.