ReadWriteWeb

In a world envisioned by a partnership between Microsoft and 24/7 Inc. announced on Tuesday, you'll someday receive a text message that your flight has been canceled, call a customer service number and be able to view flight options on your tablet as you discuss rebooking your travel with the customer service agent on the other end of the line.

It seems pretty basic, considering all that we're capable of doing in tech. But as anyone who has been put on hold for tech support, received a robo-call about suspicious activity on their credit card, or tried to deal with sudden travel changes can attest, dealing with customer service still seems to be stuck very much in the pre-Internet age.

Writing for Wharton's blog, Todd Hewlin and Scott Snyder in "Unwiring the Enterprise: Are You Ready to Lose Control?" mention an interesting concept, that of wireless becoming the last foot for moving cloud content to within arm's reach of every person on the planet. I thought about this and wonder why IT and telecoms folks always dis their customers in this fashion. It isn't the last mile or the last foot, or the last micron: it is the first foot! The customer should come first, always. It is time to change this thinking.

Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group wrote an excellent blog post on the way organizations tend to deal with exceptions to process.

"The sheer impracticality of channeling exceptions in any scalable way to get the right answers has plagued organizations for ever. Each exception requires a different set of experts or problem owners, some known but most unknown, and often spread across a global footprint at large organizations."

One of the issues facing social business and social CRM strategies is the issue of whether customers want to use social media as means for getting customer support. As of now, the phone is still the most common way to provide support. But would customers be willing to engage in other ways?

An infographic from customer experience analytics firm ClickFox organizes research on the subject and finds that two in three customers would be willing to use social media for customer service if they understood the tools better. The infographic also breaks down the cost per interaction of various types of engagement, and finds website visits to be the cheapest by far.

We're interacting and relying upon more applications and more mobile devices today than ever before. That's not a new development. And the help guides for these products started showing up online more than a decade ago, but it wasn't until recently that consumers started accessing this product help content on such a frequent and reoccurring basis.

If it's not already self-evident (or if your customers and prospects haven't already told you so), customer support and product help documentation (such as a knowledge base) matter more today than ever before. Today, this content is often the subject of the very first interaction a customer has with your company after buying your product.

But the disturbing thing about customer support sites today is that they are still primarily geared towards phone interactions, a la 1999. It's really pitiful. Customers hate the experience, and businesses lose the opportunity to build loyalty or cross-sell. We can do better.

We've questioned before the value of investing in contact center technology without improving call center conditions, and the ability of outsourced labor (regardless of whether it is also off-shored) to provide good customer service. These are the types of questions that are important for business decision makers to ask. If you want to go a bit further, you can read this story in Mother Jones about the experience of a writer from the U.S. training to work in a center in India. It doesn't provide much detail as to whether you should or shouldn't outsource your customer service functions (or to who), but it doesn't provide an interesting perspective on the conditions of these workplaces.

Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Labs, Service Now, SugarCRM, and Zendesk have agreed to support a common JSON API specification for customer service applications called NetworkedHelpDesk.org.

The idea is to make it possible for all applications related to a customer's experience to talk to each other, from help desk to bug tracking to project management. "Where things start to fall through the cracks is when customer service has to cross organization boundaries," says Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker. "Either within the organization, like customer service to engineering, or outside of the organization like to a component vendor."

You probably won't want to replace all your call center PCs with iPads, and doing "real" support work likely requires a full keyboard. But we're betting at least a few of your customer support staff have to either take work home with them or monitor issues outside of the office. Accessing the customer service help desk from the road probably isn't a good justification for buying an iPad, unless you have a lot of reps in the field using help desk software. But help desk access is a good use for iPads that your company or your employees already won.

The help desk for the iPad market seems to be just getting started. Here's a look at what's available so far.

Chatting with your customers live as they navigate your site can be pretty powerful, but how can you be sure that whatever they tell you is acted upon?

A new integration between customer chat service Olark and help desk software provider Zendesk makes this process a bit easier.

Paul Greenberg described Apple as a product and engineering centric company, as opposed to a customer and social media centric company, in the interview with Dennis Howlett we posted yesterday. But today, Mindtouch Executive Vice President of Sales Mark Fidelman, writing for Cloudave, identifies Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phillip W. Schiller as the top social Chief Marketing Officer of the Fortune 100.

What gives? Is Apple a social company or isn't it?