Jive Software introduction points to 'social' customer service ...

Jive Software is the latest social business software company to push social media and networking sensibilities into customer service software. This trend is one that will be continued, if recent predictions by market research firm Gartner are to be believed.

The company?s offering, called Jive Social Customer Service, is currently being private beta-tested and should be released by the end of March 2012. Jive Software?s application focuses not just on building out support communities where someone?s customers can help solve problems and questions without necessarily involving a customer service agent, it also enables companies to build out internal team communities that let agents help each other to deal with and address thorny customer service issues that might require more than one person?s expertise.

Those two communities, naturally, are linked together. Here are some other specific features that Jive Software touts as part of the new solution:

• The ability to integrate into existing case management and customer relationship management systems, so that certain cases can be escalated.
• Integration with Facebook, so that questions or comments that are entered on your company?s ?fan? page are pulled into the Jive Software community software. Once they are addressed, the answers can be pushed back out to the fan page.
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook
• Support for ?gamification? as a means of increasing customer engagement; the technology that Jive Software is using comes from Bunchball.
• Support for mobile devices, which is basically a given at this state of the game, especially when it comes to serious customer service engagement.

Jive Software?s introduction underscores Gartner Research?s thesis that integration with social communities will rewrite the rules for customer support solutions over the next two to three years. Among Gartner?s predictions for this space during that timeframe:

• Integrating community elements into traditional customer service solutions can help reduce costs by 10 percent to 50 percent.
• Marketing activities will increasingly be linked to customer service activities, in an effort to increase loyalty and customer satisfaction.
• Communities will backfire for a businesses that adopt a ?build it and they will come? mentality. That is, communities are important, but they must be nurtured.
• Collaborative problem-solving features and seamless mobile access will be key for next-generation customer service solutions.

(Image by Ray Smithers, courtesy of Stock.xchng)

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Source: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/business-brains/jive-software-introduction-points-to-social-customer-service/22528

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