John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing had a blog post recently wherein he said, “If you’re not participating in social media, you’re really not online.” As John puts it, gone are the days when all you needed to sell on the web was a web site. I’ve always appreciated Seth Godin’s comment that the Internet has changed marketeers’ modus operandi from shouting messages at their customers to having a conversation with them. What sales or marketing person wouldn’t prefer the conversation?

But all this talk of conversation, or as I like to think of it: participation, has gotten me thinking about Customer Service. The reason is that conventional Customer Service is the moral equivalent of shouting those messages at our customers. We let them try to find the answers in a Knowledge Base, which is what passes for self-service in this industry. If that fails, and if they paid for the right level of service, we then let them open a case and talk to a real customer service representative. Of course this still is barely at the level of a conversation. Typically that customer service representative doesn’t know enough to help us, and they are trained in the art of what the industry calls deflection. They want to keep us away from the real experts as much as possible.

How should this process work in the new Web 2.0 world? What is participation, and what should the Customer Service experience be in order to delight our customers?

R. Todd Stephens tells the cautionary tale of HSBC’s attempts to quit providing overdraft protection for recent students. It seems they made the unilateral announcement they were doing this only to be greeted by a storm of discontent organized by a national student union on Facebook called “Stop the Great HSBC Rip-Off!!!” It drew 2,500 students in just a few weeks. As Stephens puts it, this is no longer 1985 and customers don’t have to sit around and put up with whatever they’re handed. An important quote right at the end of the article is this one:

Social media simply breaks down the discontinuous nature of relationships and bonds us together, not by means of geography or family linage but one of interest.

This actually puts a finger right on the essential issue—communities joined by shared interests. That is exactly what customer communities ought to be, and it goes to the reasons why they are so important for Customer Service. If you want to maximize the Customer Service experience, wouldn’t it help to let customers interface with others who have a shared interest? Is there any better match than your other customers? If you’re seeking help, do you prefer to talk to the usual customer service representative on the phone, or would you rather talk to someone like you who already got through the problem and can tell you how to fix it? Rather than force a decision, why not offer both?

This is exactly what Helpstream is all about. We provide both a Community-based Customer Service experience that enhances contact between customers, as well as a traditional Case Management approach that has customers talking with customer service agents.