Delivering Effective Social Customer Service: How to Redefine the Way You Manage Customer Experience and Your Corporate Reputation

Chapter 3

The Ecosystem for Social Customer Service

Big picture perspective

Although this book is focused on understanding how organizations can deliver Customer Service over social channels, every so often it is worthwhile raising our eyes to stare at the stars.

The notion of an ecosystem for Social Customer Service encourages us to think more broadly than just Twitter and Facebook. Or whichever social networks are in vogue at the time you are reading this.

In truth, this chapter only manages to skim the surface of what actually lives within this definition. Yet however grand the language of “ecosystems” might seem, it is still only part of an even larger transformation. Let's call it the “digitalization” of our world.

In the work context we already witness the outcomes. More and more of our work activities are available via a browser, on any device, accessible wherever there is connectivity. We can do this on the move, in the air even underground (e.g. the London tube). OK your own organization might be a few beats behind that level of simplified connectivity but that's where the world of business is heading.

In the last decade we have also learned to use this connectivity to be social. We can now reach out as far as we have appetite for being connected to whoever, wherever. Even pets have their own social IDs these days!

However, it is not just the sentient that are enlisting in this digitalization makeover. The so-called “Internet of Things” is putting the objects in our world ...