Feeling anti-social ? Five reasons to reconsider...

Despite promising signs beginning to appear in some sectors of our Global economy, it's likely that for many organisations - cost control and better leveraging of human capital will continue to be key for a considerable period of time.

Less budgetary resource often creates greater innovation during times of competitive peer pressure since we all need to remain nimble, agile and responsive despite austerity measures.

One of the ways that organisations can differentiate themselves is through offering class-leading customer service.

Business value can be clearly measured on the bottom line since the costs associated with customer acquisition and retention are driven down.

So what does this have to do with unified communications (UC) and social networking ?

UC describes a technology architecture covering both human and device communications that provides a simplified contextual contact experience regardless of device, location or media. In other words this means being able to be contacted upon your chosen device no matter where you are, and with the same features and functionality as you would experience should you be at your desk in the office, on your mobile phone or within your home.

Now we have a baseline of UC and it's aspirations,  what is it that social networking delivers that users rate most highly ?

People like to stay abreast of what friends and colleagues are doing and thinking.

They need to be able to easily contact them for advice, insight and expertise.

They would like to easily engage with them on tasks, projects and events.

They want to share content with others and tag it for those that could share an interest.

They wish to be able to exercise control upon what others know and read about them.

The adoption of Social networking in the workplace has been mostly driven by enterprise visionaries together with the expectations of our future workforce.  Generation Y and Z (as they are often referred) demand a clarity of user interface and ease of use that those of us born between 1961 and 1981 did not necessarily expect.

So it's clear that social networking shares many inherent synergies with the ambitions of UC, and that the goals of social networking for both business and personal use are the same.

Therefore it should be no surprise that there is a growing confluence between these technologies and if executed correctly, a blurring of the line between UC and social networking should further reduce human latency, increase the rate of workflow and spin the wheels of business process faster.

But how do we begin to lower costs and drive business value from these technology components ?

There are many interface points where UC and social networking can converge with the business to deliver value so it is vital to choose a vendor that provides a breadth and depth of open integration options, and keep in mind that the most business value will be delivered through communications enabling (CEBP) or fully automating (CBPA) the business process.

Identify and Embrace

Understand what is already going on from a social perspective within your business. Just because the IT department prevent access to Facebook does not mean that your employees are not using social networking internally or externally.

Find out how many people are using external micro blogging services like Twitter or Yammer. How many people are using Linked-In, Ning or have signed up with colleagues to Socialtext or Jive Software for pilots. Lastly check how many unofficial servers are hosting wiki, blog and bulletin-board applications.

Social Listening - Brand Management, Marketing and Protection

Who's talking about your company and what are they saying?

The most tactical application of Social CRM tooling is provided by gaining awareness of the pubic social networks where your brand is discussed and being able to find and react to customers needs. The second stage of this approach is to become more strategic about your brand on the social web, and to employ software tooling to build brand awareness, monitor trending and increase acknowledgement among customers and partners.

For example - during the recent volcanic ash cloud , airlines were able to protect their brands by making contact with customers unable to get through to the contact centre due to over subscription, by reaching out through the public social network.

Competitors are glad to help migrate your customers that post problems in the social world.

Building Community Platforms (Call Deflection)
Once an enterprise has developed an understanding of the important social questions and networks surrounding their brand - such as

What are people talking about?

Where are they spending most of their time? 

Who are the net contributors?

...it becomes far less complex to build effective user communities and portals.

These community portals deliver great value to the users, but they also reduce the number of first and second line contacts to the enterprise. Unpaid advocates answer many of the frequently asked questions way before the customer contacts you directly.

Expertise Transparency / Social Search (First Time Resolution)
Many organisations are looking to increase first time resolution rates through better leverage of the tacit knowledge within their workforce, regardless of whether they are full-time CRM agents in the contact centre or back-office workers in their homes or satellite offices.

Social enterprise software and UC allows you to locate and contact the best resource to expedite the customer interaction to conclusion, either through the use of employee profile pages or automated expertise harvesting.

Workforce Management and Optimisation

Analytic tools within social software provides great insight - If we know what people are talking about, who they are from a group perspective and how much time they spend discussing and collaborating on certain topics, we can proactively drive that behaviour and better and more effectively align the social interaction of employees with the corporate strategy.

In summary, social networking is a powerful medium particularly when augmented by UC functionality and right now is the time to take action before the competition selects their strategy for you.