Social media is a hot topic all the way around, and we've seen a raft of announcements specifically targeting the integration of social media and the contact center. But in our Webinar yesterday with Interactive Intelligence, we got an indication that this is still very much early days for social media integration
We polled the audience about where they are at with social media integration, and here's the result:
So a large majority aren't integrating now, and almost half say they have no intention of integrating social media and communications.
My gut tells me that this is your basic technology skepticism at work, as well as the natural constraints of a budget-limited and workforce-limited time. While social media is definitely a real factor, the value of integrating it with communications--as opposed to letting your users play around with it on public sites--is still unproven. If we all had budget enough and time, the "No" answer might be smaller, but I think that among the real-world choices that enterprises have to make, actually committing to a socialm media integration project wouldn't rank high on the priority list.
I'm not inclined to delve too deeply into the crosstabs because the numbers get pretty small--we had 95 people answer this particular question--but at a high level, the other data we got from the "No" responders suggests a mix: More than half were from enterprises of 500+ employees; 9 of the 42 answered a previous poll by saying their communications infrastructure was all digital/traditional, no IP, while 5 said they were completely VOIP-enabled. So bottom-line, I think the cadre of "No" responders looks like a cross section of the market generally.
So social media integration may be the wave of the future, but it looks like that's where it'll reside for the time being--in the future.
