It’s been a hectic September for eServices. We have been extremely busy with our recent platform upgrade on ECN. Now that is settling in and people are seeing the benefits (and yes those niggling issues, but we’ll get them settled very quickly).  As well as addressing a lot of bugs it brings nice features to your discussions. Highlighting / embedding the answer in discussions, making it easier to mark questions as answered with one click. Other major abilities we have are Ideation and Videos. They were there before the upgrade, but with the improvements we will be using these features in the Support Forums to broaden the experience and sharing of solutions and knowledge.

As a distraction from testing the platform during the upgrade, I took time out to read Why Social Media is disruptive 

It was a fascinating read. The referred article was written in February of this year. What was especially interesting was the “Social Media Case Study: Inspired by Dell”. Now it is obvious that Dell is a rags to riches story in this case. But it is interesting to see how Dell got personally involved and listened to its customers socially. It is clearly apparent that social listening is absolutely required from a Customer Support perspective. Dells efforts are well highlighted and I take my hat off to them for a job well done.

EMC is coming from a different place. But what is common to Dell’s requirements (and practically all other businesses out there in Social) is the need to get personally involved. Social Media is a good disruption as it challenges us to integrate more with our customers.  EMC is certainly getting that right. In our Support Forums, not only are we opening up content, we are opening up our engagement. This broadens out to other Social channels too. 

For instance @EMCsupport on twitter listens and shares information on trending topics in our Support Forums. Over time this will grow to sharing other initiatives like featured blogs and videos on the Support Forums, related to trending EMC Support topics. We are developing a plan to share video solutions for trending Support problems our customers are having. The idea here is to quickly share the workaround to a known issue, and get it published to our Forums video section. (YouTube is also being considered for this also). We can then share this via Twitter, Facebook, Google + and other Social channels. Our own social listening from a Support perspective is still developing. There is a lot more to do to improve and build further engagement. We will be providing that by widening our Forums to Multilingual geographies with Multilingual Support Forums very soon. 

There are many other exciting initiatives underway. But essentially it comes down to customer engagement, listening, getting personally involved, and of course being relevant. A lot done, a lot more to do!