Service lets companies manage customer conversations

Most innovative companies have figured out that customer comments and conversations within various social media -- including Twitter, Facebook and other forums -- deserve ongoing attention of customer service agents.

But this is notoriously difficult to pull off but a new cloud applications startup has developed a cloud service for the specific purpose of helping businesses prioritize and act on those conversations.

The platform, developed by Austin, Texas-based startup Social Dynamx, monitors the conversations that your company deems relevant, bringing them to the attention of customer service agents or other relevant employees. That platform tracks all sorts of metrics related to how agents interact with that information and help resolve any issues that have bubbled up as a priority, said Social Dynamx President and COO Jan Ryan.

"It helps you triage the support issues that are surface in social networks," Ryan said.

According to Social Dynamx, more than 70 percent of the tweets sent to companies currently go unanswered while only 5 percent of comments made on Facebook business pages receive any sort of response.

The Social Dynamx service was developed to help companies get a better grip on dealing with this sort of feedback -- positive or negative. The interface allows agents to see which comments have not received responses, and it will let other agents know if there is a resolution in process for specific conversations. The reporting and analytics features allow managers to gauge how long it takes to resolve issues, whether there are particular individuals sparking frequent conversations, which social networks are driving the most feedback, and so on.

The platform is already being used by companies like Dish Network, Time Warner Cable and Convio, Ryan said.

There are several different views within the application, including ones for agents, supervisors and managers. (The screen shot below shows the supervisor interface.)

Aside from interfacing with all sorts of different social networks, the service offers integration with CRM applications, including Salesforce.com, and peer-to-peer support forums, so that companies can leverage their existing knowledgebases for customer support.

The company has captured the attention of Gartner analyst Michael Maoz, who is quoted in the Social Dynamx launch press release:

"No social enterprise transformation strategy can succeed unless customer service plays a central role. Current structures are inadequate. The challenge for senior management is to engineer the necessary processes and technology changes that will allow customer service to evolve to embrace social trends."

The Social Dynamx platform will be priced on a per-user, per-month basis, depending on the number of people that need to use the service.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com