The Freshdesk blog

Social Customer Service - The New Helpdesk Mantra

It’s amazing to see how the help desk is inching away from headset-strapped agents, towards social media. In that light, a recent post in Forbes’ CIO insight by David Gutelius, chief social scientist at Jive Software, throws some perspective on “social customer service”.

If you are too tired to read through David’s post, its about the paradigm shift between customer care that had its nerve centers in old-school call centres, to this new age of customer service that embraces “social”. And when he talks about social, he means Facebook, Twitter, brand communities and every other touchpoint where organizations can forge a relationship with customers.

In short, David says today’s support software need to be built as ‘enablers’, giving customers the ability to look for solutions themselves, have a community with which they can engage and discover, set up knowledge bases that they can draw from, and so on.

And for all the right reasons, David’s post was like the ShamWow infomercial, for Freshdesk. Honest! In fact, a lot of David’s points were and still are the secret sauce that led to us create the first truly social customer service tool, Freshdesk.

But David magically seems to continue on our infomercial journey, highlighting the importance of analytics and insights into what customers look at and don’t look at. Like knowing what the customer needs so we can give her exactly the content she wants. It’s either a lucky coincidence or we are bang on target with our Freshdesk/Google Analytics integration a few weeks back.

To be fair, the post seems to downplay the effect of social customer support on the customer’s trust and brand-love. It’s awesome when you know you can vent your frustration and somebody is out there to listen and solve your problems. But overall, David seems to hit the nail on social customer service, it right on its Facebook-page-liking head!

Customer service is all about making the customer smile. And as Forbes puts it, ‘‘the best customer service team on the planet is a group of humans using social technology”. Well, man is an animal too!