Leveraging Social Business Strategy For A More Agile Organization: An Interview with Customer Service Futurist Esteban Kolsky

While the individuals that make up an organization might leverage Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn for personal use, most have not come up with any formal strategy on how to put internal and external collaborative technologies to work for business gains. In this podcast Esteban Kolsky, former Gartner analyst, consultant, strategist, blogger and thinker, clarifies some misconceptions about social media and guides us toward some initial tools and methodologies.

Kolsky is one of the most respected thought leaders in the field on enterprise 2.0 and social CRM. With over twenty years of experience working with customers across all areas, if it has to do with customers, he has both done it hands on and advised clients on how to do it well.

Kolsky will be presenting at CRM Evolution, a media partner to Customer Management IQ, taking place August 2nd to the 4th, 2010 at the Marriott in New York City this summer. He has some surprising and counterintuitive insights for listeners from contact centers on how to do social strategy right.

All eyes are currently on the contact center, providing an opportunity to change from a cost center to a revenue and idea generating arm of the business. But this will take more work than it seems. Kolsky warns that the first barrier to becoming a social business is you need be social internally. And most contact centers just aren't there yet.

Social business strategy, from a social customer perspective, should include people, process, governance and metrics. This is not just establishing a Twitter page and calling it quits. Now we have the technology to intimately know our customers including what they need, want and think. The opportunity is about working collaboratively with the customer and reducing cost of service while improving potential revenues.

The challenge is addressing the level of access, security and compliance to successfully engage with communities. And each organization needs to establish an initial framework for its approach to online communities and collaboration. Each organization needs to ask itself "what is the level of access, security and compliance to successfully engage with communities?"

In this podcast Kolsky addresses key issues businesses need to consider as they begin to establish social strategies, a sneak peak of his presentation at CRM Evolution in New York City this summer. For more information you can visit the CRM Evolution Website.