I was reading a very interesting post by Harold Jarche a moment ago – The Social Imperative. In the post, Jarche writes: “The fundamental lesson that Sopolski came back with was that “textbook social systems that are engraved in stone” can be changed in one single generation.” In this instance, a catastrophe – the spread of tuberculosis (which wiped out all the alpha males within a troop of baboons) – became the trigger for the ensuing change – a troop that was ‘much less aggressive and more social’.
So what I’m wondering to myself is whether we are currently in that ‘one single generation’ that will see a fundamental shift take place in the way customer service is provided. Is social customer care the ‘catastrophe’? Not social customer care in terms of the technology – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc – but social customer care as a mindset, a philosophy, a way of doing, a way of thinking. Social customer care as a key that helps to unlock the ability for companies to actually deliver on the many promises they made in the name of customer centricity,
I know there are those who say social customer care isn’t working, but to me, that’s interpreting social customer care within the constricting paradigm of customer service as we know it. Social customer care represents something that can be different, is different. It affords companies the opportunity to willingly disrupt their ‘systems that are engraved in stone’. It affords companies the opportunity to be bold. [Do they dare?]
It is also a warning: if companies choose not to do so in this ‘one single generation’, others will do it on your behalf. In fact, they have already started…
