In the past, the rise of new contact center channels has often been somewhat gradual (at least by high-tech standards). This was the case with e-mail and many Web-based channels. (Think about how long Web chat has been around and the fact that it’s only now becoming a very important customer contact channel.)

With social media, however, the rise in customers using these channels to contact companies has been meteoric. Writing for CMS Wire, Ashley Verrill, a market analyst and CRM blogger for Software Advice, notes that social media has experienced huge growth as a customer service channel, with an estimated 47 percent of social media users now engaging with companies in this way.

The quick rise of social customer service has taken many companies by surprise. They were simply unprepared for it: many of them were monitoring social media in a very casual way in a department that wasn’t the call center – marketing or public relations – which meant they were unable to handle it as a customer contact channel. They have yet to integrate it into the contact center in a way that social media posts can simply become part of the greater queue. They also use social media in a very one-way manner: sending out Tweets or making Facebook (News - Alert) posts without responding to customer posts in return. This is a huge mistake, and many companies today are leaving opportunities on the table.

It won’t be easy, notes Verrill in her article.

“This trend presents a formidable challenge for companies that receive thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of tweets per day,” she writes. “As I learned in a research project I conducted for my company last year, many still struggle to meet these expectations. The project, dubbed The Great Social Customer Service Race, involved tweeting customer service requests to 14 top consumer brands every weekday for a month. They responded just 14 percent of the time on average.”

It’s important to keep in mind that these are top brands. If they can’t even manage it, what hope to smaller companies have?

Cloud contact center solutions provider Five9 (News - Alert) recently interviewed Verrill about the topic of social customer service. The company asked why so many large brands were falling down on managing the critical process.

“Organizations of all sizes don’t respond in a timely manner – or fail to respond altogether – to social customer service inquiries for two main reasons,” Verrill said. “First…some companies receive thousands of mentions a day; they simply don’t have a defined process for finding and triaging them efficiently. They miss the desperate cries for help because they don’t have a system that helps them organize different types of traffic.”

These companies would be well served by seeking a social CRM solutions that offer automatic prioritization, which lets you assign rules or policies to detect certain kinds of posts and group them together, said Verrill.

“A company can use prioritization tools in tandem with sentiment technology to create a group for ‘angry’ users. This would help you notice and respond to social media mentions that should probably receive immediate attention.”

Another reason companies miss so much when it comes to social media is that they are looking for the wrong things.

“The other reason many businesses fail to respond to social customer service requests is that they don’t have a way to catch all mentions of their brand,” explained Verrill. “Social media teams often only monitor for ‘@-mentions,’ or mentions of the brand using the official brand handle or tag (News - Alert). You should also be monitoring for hashtagged brand mentions or non-tagged messages that include reference to your company.”

Ultimately, if you don’t have a robust process to even catch all the social media posts that involve your brand and your customers, you won’t be able to respond to them. If you’re not responding to them, you’re doing your company a double disservice: harming customer relationships and failing to take advantage of what could be significant opportunities.