A curious thing is happening on social media from a business perspective. When it became clear that a significant chunk of the planet was spending a significant amount of time on social media destinations such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (News - Alert) and more, businesses rushed to established presences in those places. After all, “Go where your customers are” is sound advice. Most of these companies believed social media would become another great (and free!) advertising channel to send one-way messages to customers.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the marketing campaign: it became clear that customers had no intention of allowing social media to become a one-way channel. Customers also expected to be able to engage companies on these channels, and get responses to their questions, comments and concerns, according to a recent blog post by Avaya’s (News - Alert) Laura Bassett.

“While companies have been focused primarily on engaging their followers with creative content, enticing them to consume more of their products and services, many have also learned that servicing customers on social media is desirable, and sometimes mandatory, as well as efficient,” wrote Bassett. “In many organizations the resources responsible for creating content are challenged by the quantity and breadth of the customer questions.”

It turns out Facebook (News - Alert) isn’t just a digital billboard, and LinkedIn isn’t just a way to recruit new sales managers. Social media has become yet another channel that companies must put into the already complex multimedia mix they use to offer customer support. For this reason, it’s apparent that social media belongs to the contact center. Not only that, social media needs to be handled in the same way every other customer contact is approached.

Many companies are still grappling with this fact. They had dumped social media into the lap of marketing with an off-hand, “Have fun, guys!” attitude. Marketing, suddenly overwhelmed by complaints that clearly needed to be addressed lest the problems escalate virally through social media, panicked. At this point, smart companies found a way to integrate social media into the contact center.

No, it’s not easy. It adds extra work to a sometimes already overwhelmed company resource. But there is also grand opportunity here to market to customers in an interactive, multimedia way, to allow them to help each other, to improve the mobile experience for customers, and to provide increased customer delight, which is critical in today’s business environment.

Many companies have found success in choosing a contact center platform that already integrates social media firmly into the contact center queue, handling social media posts just as they would other types of contacts. Provider such as Five9 (News - Alert) has worked hard to integrate the social conversation into the contact center in a way that helps companies take advantage of the opportunities and minimize the hassles. Five 9’s social customer service component allows companies to empower customer care agents to respond to problems and issues posted to social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (News - Alert), blogs, articles, and online communities, all while weeding out non-actionable posts automatically.

The question isn’t about when your customers will begin to expect social customer care from your company. They already do. Now, what counts is what your organization plans to do about it.