Are You Integrating Social Data into Your Customer Engagement Strategy?

The paradigm shift has already begun to enable content creators and their peers to curate their own knowledge across blogs, wikis and social streams, such as Twitter. It’s vital that enterprise organizations work quickly to integrate those data streams in real-time to better understand customer requirements, state of satisfaction, and challenges. If not, they will miss prime opportunities to:

• Have the full picture when engaging with customers on support cases and sales
• Identify sales opportunities based on customer requests
• Improve engineering and R&D initiatives, based on real-time customer feedback

According to a survey we conducted earlier this year, 65 percent of respondents noted that they do not combine social data with enterprise content, or aren’t sure if this is happening. Is this surprising? Yes, on the one hand, considering that many companies are tracking customer feedback via social channels. On the other hand, it is not surprising that the information being “listened to” to is not being integrated with other enterprise content in real time—this requires, after all, the new information integration paradigm—virtual information integrations—and so is at an early stage of adoption.

If you’re not integrating the information available in social streams in conjunction with internal customer resources currently in place, you may not have the full picture—which can result in poor customer experiences, loss of revenue and missed opportunities. It’s time to embrace a new way to integrate information—without moving data, and without integrating systems.

Are you a leader who is integrating social and enterprise content?