Contact centers are adopting cloud-based technology in droves, attracted by the model’s low up-front costs, flexibility and scalability and the promise of being able to run the contact center from anywhere in the event of weather emergencies or power outages.

According to some experts, however, while these are all very valid reasons for adopting the cloud-based model, one of the major factors should be the growing influence of social media and social customer service.

UK-based contact management solutions provider Intelecom says the way customers choose to communicate is changing rapidly and contact centers must be adaptable in how they interact with customers, noting that it’s critical that companies are able to respond to voice, e-mail, social media, chat, SMS and Web “call me” requests from the same queue and within the same application. Without the ability to do this, companies risk providing a disjointed customer experience in which agents don’t have a complete picture of the customer relationship before they service customers.

According to some recent studies, a lack of context of previous interactions is one of the biggest complaints the modern customer has about the quality of customer service provided today, and without this ability, contact centers will be unable to offer true customer engagement.

Customer engagement is critical: analyst group Gartner (News - Alert) has predicted that by 2015, enterprises that have not yet embraced the concept of the customer engagement center, incorporating social media, will lose customers to competitors that have. Other predictions include that by 2016, as many as 50 percent of enterprises will use social media as a customer channel.

The risks are high: while the percentage of customers using social media as a way to contact a company may be small today, they are increasing, and within the next few years, they will reach critical mass. Companies without a robust cloud-based contact center platform that allows them to build social media into the mix (and not just stick it on as a bolt-on option) risk being left behind by an increasingly sophisticated modern customer who expects the highest quality service at any time, from anywhere and by any media he or she chooses to tap.