How can companies leverage Chatter and other social media tools to enhance the customer service experience? The remainder of the Bluewolf Customer Care Roudtable session dived into specifics around Social CRM and specifically the Salesforce.com Chatter app.

With the advent of social media tools such as salesforce.com Chatter, Facebook, and Twitter, customer service has shifted entirely. Think about it.  If someone has an issue and they post it on salesforce.com Chatter, within minutes, their post will be read by several people, many of whom will offer a solution.  Prior to salesforce.com Chatter, people had to email or reach out to individuals within their company to get an issue resolved, which could take hours.  And Facebook and Twitter offer a whole new way to get insight into what your customers think about your service or product.

Some of the main questions at the session were:

• What is salesforce.com Chatter REALLY and how are other Salesforce CRM clients using?
• Should you “implement” salesforce.com Chatter or should you just “turn it on”?
• Can you manage permissions and/or govern salesforce.com Chatter?
• How can you make salesforce.com Chatter visible to non-salesforce users?
• Should we use salesforce.com Chatter or is salesforce.com Ideas better for internal user feedback?

In attendance was Bo Mullen of salesforce.com.  His first piece of advice was simply “turn it on!” as a first step.  He shared that Marc Benioff, CEO/Founder of salesforce.com, mandated that each employee have a full profile with a picture and a bio and would crack down on anyone who didn’t.  He said Marc led by example by communicating strictly via Chatter with his employees (given that it was Chatter appropriate). Now that salesforce.com is using Chatter internally, their email usage has decreased by 40%!

Here are some recommended practices for getting started with salesforce.com Chatter:

• Market salesforce.com Chatter to your employees like you would a marketing campaign to prospects.
• Make sure the leadership team in your company leads by example and uses Chatter to communicate.
• Find your power users within each department – get them using it and have them fire up others to use the tool.
• Try and revert to Chatter instead of Instant Messaging so that knowledge can be shared.

So in conclusion how do you make your customers more satisfied, happier, and create more retention? Utilize social media sites to allow for an open exchange between an entire community of people that can resolve customer care issues and then inherently educate future users on how things can be done better.

Because it’s the power of many in social media that results in quick, effective and honest customer dialogue.