Many people confuse community-based customer service with crowd-sourcing customer service, but in fact leveraging hyper-sociality in customer service is not the same as crowd-sourcing your customer support activities.

In some rare cases there may be enough passion around your offering or a critical mass of users surrounding your products so that you can crowd-source customer service. In most cases, however, your support activities will remain at the center of the customer service community, and be amplified by the community, not replaced.

Microsoft may be able to turn every single one of their support articles into a wiki and expect decent results from co-creating those support articles with their users. For most companies with fewer users this could end up in disaster – with tons of inaccuracies, stale articles, or worse, content that could expose you to liability.

Social media allowed the social to scale beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before. To succeed in leveraging social media and the inevitable invasion of the social in everything we do, we need some new management thinking.

Let me illustrate my point by using the example of three companies who are trying to sense and respond to what’s being said about them in the social media space.

Company A (all three companies are real Fortune 200 companies) has a head of social media who has a sophisticated social media monitoring solution. The last time I spoke with him he was ready to toss out the whole system. The reason? Even though they had developed sophisticated workflow processes to ensure that the right department would respond to the online chatter, he felt like the system was not working. They were monitoring what was being said about them, but they were not engaging. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later I ran into an employee from that same company who was in sales support for one of the product-lines and he had developed his own Yahoo! pipes to filter chatter about his product – he didn’t want to use the corporate system.

Company B is fairly happy with its engagement in social media. They too have a sophisticated social media monitoring solution with a process-heavy workflow system in the background. The reason that they feel good about what they are doing is because they have a dedicated team of people who engage with customers, prospects and detractors in various social media circles. Their biggest frustration? That they cannot manage to create a coordinated company response when something bubbles up – it always ends up being an uncoordinated response by a number of individuals.

Company C developed a very simple monitoring tool that can easily be configured by individuals. It has no workflow system in the background and does not produce the sophisticated reports that you can bring to your staff meeting every week. They encourage all employees to download the little app, monitor what they think is important and engage where appropriate and without embarrassing the company. Their program is hugely successful and the company is very happy with the results. They embraced the messy side of the social and harnessed the power of emergence that comes with it.

When faced with leveraging the social in business we need new management thinking. In large distributed companies, people in the trenches don’t trust that corporate knows what they should be listening for, and they will not spend any of their own social capital to respond to things that they don’t feel is response-worthy. They feel like they know their business and customers better than anybody else and want to do it themselves. Unfortunately not everyone can configure their own Yahoo! pipes and so much of the sensing goes unanswered when controlled from the top down. The other thing to realize is that from a customer or prospect point of view, they could care less about coordinated corporate responses – they like to hear from people. What’s wrong if three people try to help you when you have a problem? You feel special – much more so than if you get a corporate-speak laden anonymous response from a faceless organization.

Lesson learned: Embrace social messiness, leverage the power of emergence, and let go of top down processes. Let people connect with people.

We just finished a series of in-depth interviews with companies who are deploying social media as part of their business processes. Most initiatives were marketing based – and none were focused on deploying social media as part of customer service.

What is wrong with that picture?

Customer service is a perfect place for people to use social media – people love helping others, and at some point in the customer lifecycle, most people need help.

It is also ironic to realize that the biggest brand damage often occurs through a poor customer service experience.

So why are marketers not seeing that as a fertile ground for social interactions with customers and as a way to achieve some big marketing and brand benefits? Is it because marketers have grown myopic and no longer consider customer service as part of the brand experience? It is not because marketers do not actually run customer service that they should not consider it as an important touch-point between the company, the product and the customer. When looking at companies like Zappos or Tivo, where they have turned customer service into their main customer touch point, you realize that even if what you’re after is increased word of mouth or increased sales – customer service may be your best avenue.

Maybe I am just missing something…

Or maybe not – in most companies, customer service is treated as an expense, just like marketing…

It really should be an investment!

I am scheduled to travel to Belgium to visit my father who was diagnosed with two aneurisms and is facing a fairly complex and dangerous operation later this month. When he had an aneurism 17 years ago it burst and not only did he almost lose his live – he lost his business.

So I made reservations on Air France to go visit, and when I called my parents today with my itinerary I realized that I had made a mistake. I wanted to come back on the 27th and for some reason when I ordered through airfrance.com they booked me a train from Brussels to Parin on the 27th and a flight on the 28th. Now I order stuff online all the time, and if there is an overnight situation I expect the site to alert me to this. I called Air France, hoping that they would rectify the situation, as I do not want to spend a night around the Paris Airport and also need to be back in the US on the 27th. When I heard that they had plenty of room on the 27th, I thought it would be a no-brainer for them to change my reservation – and was even prepared to pay a fine for what surely was their screwed up user interface. But no, they could not change it – I begged, played nice, tried the empathy card – but the answer was no way, non, merde…you lose your ticket and buy a new one (which I did – but on Air Lingus – hoping the Irish are somewhat better).

Now my family has been using Air France ever since the Belgian Airline went out of business 6 or so years ago.

In these bad economic times, you would expect companies whose service are going to be the first to be cut from personal and business budgets to do everything they can to hold on to their customers – especially if it does not cost them a dime to accommodate the change request which would satisfy the customer, and perhaps make up for their deficient product offering.

I am flabbergasted – but should I? You could blame customer service arrogance, something that the French have been accused of, but in the end it has become an industry-wide behavioral attitude.

How do we customers give them the middle finger?

You brand is defined by the consumer, not by you – I think everyone can agree with that. In the same breath, most marketing pundits will add the fact that you can no longer control your brand – an assertion I am not sure goes hand in hand with the first one.

You brand gets defined by the UI (User Interface) of your company, the interface through which your customers and prospects interact with your company. That interface gets determined by pre-sale activities – i.e., advertising, retail layout, retail personnel attitude, telemarketing, sales people’s knowledge of the industry, etc -, as well as immediate post-sale activities – i.e., packaging, ease of use to set up the products, available help options, etc. -, and the long term post sale activities – i.e., telephone support, return policies, warranty policies, on-site support, etc. That makes up a lot of links in the chain that determines your brand in the mind of the consumers which your company controls.

So in effect, you do control the brand in the mind of the consumer. If some link in the chain is broken, meaning not supporting the overall brand promise you are trying to establish for your company, that is when you lose control of your brand. That is when people will start talking with one another about the fact that what you promise and what you deliver is different. Once that starts, you should focus on fixing the overall UI of your company instead of getting into communication fire-fighting mode or crisis communication mode.