Social media moves into the customer engagement mainstream

More and more firms are using social media to improve their relationships with customers, with adoption of social networks for customer support up by 15% (to 51%) since last year.

Findings from Econsultancy's 2011 Customer Engagement Report, produced in association with cScape, suggest that, with greater adoption of social channels for customer service and product development, companies are losing their fear of social media.
Companies are also increasingly using social technology internally to improve communication and business performance, with a third of companies (32%) using internal social networking for employee communication.

The number of company respondents who regard customer engagement as “essental” has decreased from 55% last year to 50% this year, though agency results are slightly different with the proportion (who say their clients regard it as essential) increasing from 55% last year to 57% this year.

Investment in customer engagement seems to be paying off for companies, with almost three-quarters of client-side respondents (74%) saying that their engagement strategy has been either “very successful” (9%) or “quite successful” (65%).
In addition, the proportion of companies that have not been very successful in this respect has declined by 4% on last year's survey.

http://www.cscape.com/services/Pages/CustomerEngagement.aspx