And in 2013, IDC found that online communities – be that customer, employee, partners and suppliers – has claimed the top spot. IDC analyst Michael Fauscette told MyCustomer.com that he wasn’t surprised by the survey findings: “A lot of companies we talk to are in the process of looking at it and doing something with communities.
“There’s a lot of value in the use of communities, particularly on the side with customer interaction,” he explains. “The idea that companies can build customer communities that can then be used for peer-to-peer support, which is of high value for the customer. It gets them really engaged with the company and helps the company either because it reduces the call volume into their customer support organisations or it changes the tenure of that so their customer agents can focus on more difficult problems.”
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So moving forward, integrating these siloed networks into company culture and then integrating these employee network tools into customer communities will be the main trend this year.
via Online communities: Consolidate to avoid the social network sprawl.
Check out the whole interview with Michael Fauscette. Very interesting on the sprawl of internal (Enterprise) and external Social Networks.