Gartner expects social CRM to take off over next five years

Enterprises will soon start adopting more social CRM tools to improve customer service processes, according to industry analyst Gartner.

Within five years 40 per cent of the top 1,000 companies with a contact centre will be supporting or replacing them with peer-to-peer collaboration projects.

However, those that are risk averse will continue to avoid the tools due to there being an insufficient business model.

"Social CRM for customer service has only recently entered into the realm of contact centre infrastructure and customer service software components, where it has been met with significant hype despite a limited number of field deployments," said Drew Kraus, research vice-president at Gartner.

"There is strong corporate awareness of social networks and their potential impact on corporate brand management and customer service perception," he said.

"We expect the high-profile nature of social networks and social CRM for customer service to rapidly advance adoption from early adopter to mainstream deployments," he added.

Currently, social CRM for customer service is typically being limited to brand management exercises on Twitter and Facebook, but executives are coming under pressure to develop new effective strategies as companies do not want to be left behind.