Cracking Engagement Workflow Design Using Semantic Technologies

Highlight: Semantic technology companies using natural language processing for social media monitoring have been developing CRM features within their products. The new CRM features are helping those software companies to distribute opportunities found within social media to the right person or department within a company, and also track any company and customer response. The new CRM features are a recent development because brand companies are still developing a workflow process for social media engagement, and the software is catching up to model the business process management.

It takes a tremendous amount of time to monitor social media and sift through the amount of idle chatter that exists to find the relevant opportunities, be they related to sales, customer service, product innovation or thought leadership. Semantic technologies and natural language processing are helping to reduce the time it takes to find opportunities within social media. A company can define the workflow process that must be developed to take those opportunities found in social media and distribute them within a company to be responded by employees and resolved.

If you think about this process it is very simple, find an opportunity within social media, triage the opportunity to find the right person in a company to respond, and track the response. Lastly tie the data you pull from social media, and responses by a company back into a company’s CRM and ERP systems.

Companies are concerned about the time it takes to blog, and fear becoming engaged with customers on social media, because they are unsure where that engagement will lead. Typically there is no infrastructure within a company to handle social media opportunities. Who should handle even a crisis communication incident? Is it public relations, customer service, product management?

By describing the workflow process strategy, a company will be able to establish certainty and by using software technologies help to reduce the time it takes to manage opportunities within social media.

Workflow process can be built for many disciplines related to social media, here’s a few that come to mind: 1) Thought leadership, 2) customer service, 3) product management and innovation, 4) Public affairs and crisis management.

The key over the next few years for companies is designing the workflow strategy for their company. Who is going to respond to a customer service issue? What skills and training do you need to be able to respond? Based upon how divisions work within a particular company how opportunities found in social media will be triaged and distributed within a company for a resolution. Lastly, how do we track opportunities, monitoring results and responses and integrate the customer contacts and new business intelligence within a company’s existing enterprise systems?