Recently, customer-facing organizations have had to accept that social media has officially become an important customer contact channel, and this has left many companies scrambling to build social media into their contact center infrastructure.

Consulting and research firm Fifth Quadrant has found that more than two-thirds (70 percent) of Australian businesses are using a social media platform to deliver customer service. The findings were presented in Fifth Quadrant’s report, "Emerging Consumer Channels: Social Media, Web chat and Smartphone Apps.” The new explores the evolution of social media, Web chat and smartphone apps as customer service channels, according to Computerworld.

In Australia, Facebook is the number one choice for customer service engagement via social media, followed by online forums and communities, and YouTube. Twitter (News - Alert), LinkedIn and blogs were the least popular options, with more than seven in 10 consumers stating they "rarely" or "never" turn to them for customer service purposes.

There are a number of reasons why customers like social media for contact companies. For starters, it’s more immediate and urgent than many other methods, such as checking an e-mail. Secondly, it’s more visible, which means it’s harder for companies to ignore. When a customer airs a complaint in front of hundreds or thousands of “friends,” that customer knows that a company will take the matter more seriously. It’s public and recorded, which avoids the “he said/she said” scenarios common in call center-based telephone calls.

In fact, it would appear that Australian businesses are better prepared when it comes to social media than customers are. Not quite one in three consumers said they use social media "often" when seeking customer service, and 33 percent plan to increase their use of it in the next year.

Chris Kirby, head of research at Fifth Quadrant, notes that this disconnect between consumers and companies may be in part because the two are seeking each other in the wrong places. While consumers spend more time engaging with companies on Facebook (News - Alert), businesses are more focused on Twitter.