Let me explain my personal perspective about this topic cause I see a lot of focus on the importance of providing an innovative customer service program through social media trying to give an alternative to the traditional one provided by “obsolete” contact center.

I recently read a really well-done report by Strategic Contact (you can download it here) where you can find useful information about the main drivers that form the cost structure of a contact center:

• Fixed staffing (management) – FTEs, Salaries, Benefits and Taxes
• Variable staffing (agents and supervisors) – FTEs, Productivity, Wages, Benefits, Taxes, Hiring & Training Costs...

Read the article

As you know I have dealt with listening activity and its essential role in a Social CRM strategy (just to refresh your memory you can read here and here) many times and I’m absolutely convinced that every company need to set the technological and organizational infrastructures that can enable market insight (just as I was and am still convinced about gathering and analyzing customer feedbacks flowing through traditional touchpoints like IVR, email, phone call, survey, web form and so on).

Normally you read about well-known guidelines and approaches that tell you how to capture  and analyze industry/sector conversations or direct ones about you and your competitors; and everything starts with a wise choice of keywords and a good set of Boolean operators maybe shared with domain experts. That’s really great and it’s the first main layer on which Owyang’s Social CRM use cases are based on.

But I think something is missing especially considering that ... Read the article