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

Chapter 10

One Agenda: PR, Marketing and Customer Service Working Together

Coming to the end of our exploration around Social Customer Service provides an opportunity to loosen our focus and put the whole discussion into a broader organizational context. In Chapter 2 we talked about the current transformation that “digitalization” is causing. Our personal and professional worlds are being redefined. Social Customer Service is a symptom of the new behaviours being generated.

As far as the world of organizations is concerned, commentators have used various terms such as Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business to label the impact that this transformation is having on the way we work, relate and generate value. Tremendous energy is being invested in bringing this about. And guess what? Two of the most popular sandboxes that house these experiments are internal collaboration amongst employees and external collaboration with customers: both leveraging the dynamic of being social, transparent and real-time.

However, this trend towards collaboration is fighting over a hundred years of corporate habit and history. Long-standing corporate cultures are cemented in place. Their functional structures deeply embedded into the foundations of organizational behaviour. Put more simply, it's going to take a while!

“Organizations can be really selfish, designing processes for their benefit and not their customers. Many organizations are guilty of making the customer fit with their processes. Then, because ...