For the past two years, social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 and TruCast have enabled organisations to track discussions of their brand and select keywords online - on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and elsewhere. Now they want to inject themselves into those customer conversations by blending social media and contact centre tools.

One pioneer in this area, cable communications services operator Comcast, has already applied what is becoming known as "social support" by reaching out to customers who have complained in a blog or tweet, in an attempt to resolve their problem.

And contact centre vendor Siemens recently announced it would integrate social media platforms into its unified communications platform, OpenScape, during 2010. "Customers’ contact centre personnel will be able to transform the customer experience by making proactive contact with individual end-users," the company says.

"The integration allows end-users’ individual tweets - such as complaints about service - to be monitored and routed directly into the contact centre where the appropriate team personnel can review the messages and contact the user directly with suggested fixes."

Illustration: Michael Kirkham