Social and mobile service support

Do social media and mobile devices improve support? To hear the vendors and pundits you'd certainly think so. It may not surprise you to learn I'm more skeptical.

I've addressed related topics before:

• Social media is a communication channel, and not a very good one. For ITSM, social media presents a few issues to be dealt with, and even fewer opportunities.
• User self-help what a load of bollocks this idea is that users are going to support each other without a service desk.
• Killing the Help Desk Softly - or Blowing It Up If end users provide some mutual support and therefore reduce help-desk calls that will be nice. We've had super-users and local support for years. It didn't seem to help that much, but yes it is useful. The service desk isn't going away any time. Looks like we have to make do with less staff. Pops there goes the Genius Bar.
• What will affect the service desk over the next three years... #145 Internal social media

But the barrage of hype continues so I want to look at it again. There are two aspects we should consider here:

Do social and mobile improve the user experience?
Do social and mobile improve support's efficiency and effectiveness? Put another way, is it worth the investment?

First, user experience.

Is it more fun for a user to use a cool device? Sure
Does it make a user happy to use their own mobile device? Sure.
Does mobility make it easier to get an answer to a support request? Sure.

So absolutely mobile devices improve the user's experience of service support.

Does social media improve the user's experience of service support?
This is less straightforward.

Social media provides access to peer support and community support. Such support will be mixed. The internet is full of bad advice along with the good. Only discriminating, intelligent, technically literate people will get good support from peers and community, by being able to filter out the gold from the ...er... dross. Unfortunately IT contains a disproportionately high number of discriminating, intelligent, technically literate people so IT folk get a distorted view of just how good this social support is.

All randomly-selected human populations are normally distributed. This means the capability of people to be discriminating, intelligent, and technically literate follows a bell curve. Allowing the middle and lower thirds of the tech-savvy spectrum to get unfiltered advice is a Bad Idea. (Allowing the lower two-thirds to provide the advice - which social media does - is an Even Worse Idea). Unless your user community is all skewed to that top third of the tech-savvy spectrum, (such as software vendors, IT analysts, IT media, and all the other groups telling us how great it is) then IT will probably spend near as much time unravelling bad fixes as the time we save from the good fixes we weren't involved in. In most other industries, they aren't skewed towards geekdom. They'll too often make a cock-up of finding their own answers.

Second, do social and mobile improve support's efficiency and effectiveness?

Once again mobile has a small positive contribution. We're all on the run these days. the ability to open, check on, or work on a ticket on the go is nice. For desktop support people its near essential, but for the rest of us, its a nice-to-have. If a ticket needs real attention, most of us would sit down at a fully-functional computer and start seriously searching, diagnosing, and communicating.

From the social media perspective, once you strip out all the bullshit, it is a new channel to the service desk, supplementing phone, email, forms, walk-ups and whatever else. I'm all for improving the support channels. Stuart Rance HP did a presentation

social media helps end users solve their own problems. Monitoring social media has become essential in following customer and industry sentiment and even potentially identifies opportunities to resolve customer issues that we don’t otherwise know about

The problem arises when some pundits and vendors think that changing the channel means that everything is changed. It isn't. IF you are in a consumer market there is the issue of user communities supporting each other, which could be a nightmare of misinformation as discussed above, not to mention competitor FUD, and lost improvement data.

So we try to intercept support conversations in the wild (in public, or in the company employee community), and inject correct resolution information and a show of support. The moment we engage that user community through social media, we need all the same mechanisms we have always had:

• We must still have a ticket so that we don't lose anybody. Losing past conversations really pisses customers off.
• The tickets ought to be in one central system else chaos reigns.
• We must still capture a record of action (a) for an audit trail if these is a complaint (b) so we can learn.
• We must capture that learning in such a way that (a) it is ahared and (b) it is accessible to everyone including users themselves.
• We must still have plan, policy, process, procedures, roles for how to deal with the tickets else there is no repeatability (inconsistent service to customers REALLY pisses them off), no transfer of knowledge and culture to new employees, and nothing to improve.
• We must still have statistics so we can know if we are improving or not.

i.e. nothing changes when you improve or change the channel. It's just a channel. All the hard work remains the same.