I was at a SXSW event sponsored by Maggie Fox and company from SMG on Friday night (Thanks Charlie and Maggie!) and spent some time talking to folks involved in the world of Social Media. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time thinking about this topic and how the ultimate maturation and commoditization of these technologies will be leveraged in the context of customer service and technical support delivery. There are tons of interesting opportunities, in my view. Here are a couple of quick examples of what I’m talking about.

1. Twitter for Case Creation – In my last gig at Motion we had tons of “Rinse & Repeat” product failures or breakages. That’s the world of mobile computing hardware, after all. When a customer contacted us we needed two obvious things. The first was basic contact information, and if we were speaking with a regular that managed a large pool of product it was a straightforward exercise most of the time. The second thing we needed was the serial number of the device. With it we could quickly determine its configuration, warranty and entitlement, break/fix history, etc. The transaction itself was very simple. We simply needed to trigger case management and repair logistics workflow so boxes could ship, repair centers could be notified of an inbound product, etc.

   It occurred to me that a tool like Twitter would be fabulous for the poor IT guy running around a hospital needing to set up repair cases. Why couldn’t case management and CRM systems “Follow” Twitter updates from a particular source, who’s only Tweet’s contain a serial number and short failure code that a case management system could monitor? Since we know who the Twitter ID is we now have a primary key that could pre-populate the contact info, and if the body of the message was a serial number, we’d know what the warranty was, what size box to send, etc. The second set of info could be short codes that tell us what the failure is. What a time saver.

2. Facebook for Field Support Escalations – I’ve been involved in countless customer escalations that are comprised of varied and diverse teams addressing product performance or deployment challenges that take weeks or months to run their course. Typically these scenarios involve the customer and their internal organizations, Sales teams, systems consultants, resellers/partners/vendors, Engineering teams, corporate executives or sponsors, and of course the Service & Support organizations. We’ve all seen how the “Cc:” list grows with each day, sometimes with upwards of 20 people all wanting to know the latest and greatest, or simply do some CYA and manage upward.

   These “Escalation Micro-Projects” tend to have several disparate companies or organizations that need regular status updates on a particular topic but from people that otherwise might not have an affinity for one another. These loosely coupled “relationships” may only last for two weeks or splinter off in to other separate groups. But essentially they are temporary workgroups that don’t want to get blasted with email all day, want to be kept up to date on status, and need to share documents, rich media, and such. They can’t do that as easily via in-house apps like SharePoint or Outlook due to obvious access concerns, and the relationships don’t warrant it anyway since they’ll likely end soon.

   Facilities like Facebook can be leveraged to quickly assemble a team, get them all communicating in a common interface, and be more effective. Imagine them all being members of a Social Media group named “Acme, Inc – Case #456789″ or “Acme, Inc. Implementation & Roll-Out”.

It’s food for thought anyway. There are some things that need to get sorted out of course, such as how entitlement and proprietary information are kept private, and discretion becomes an issue. But it’s just as easy to forward emails around to others so I don’t see how this would be much different. I’m continuing to read more and more about this and see what various groups are doing to talk about social media technologies in service and support delivery. The notion of “Service 3.0″ and what delivery looks like in five years is pretty fascinating.