Kristin Moyer

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Kristin R. Moyer
Research Director
11 years at Gartner
18 years IT industry

Kristin Moyer is a research director in Industry Advisory Services/Banking and Investment Services. She has more than 17 years of experience across the global high-technology industry in a variety of roles. Ms. Moyer's research coverage includes card… Read Full Bio

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Twitter: Going Beyond Chatter to Integrated Customer Service Tool

by Kristin Moyer  |  March 25, 2009  |  3 Comments

Hi there – Alistair Newton and Stessa Cohen here. We were interested in the announcement this week by Salesforce.com that they were to offer a module of their CRM based software tools focused on allowing institutions to better track “conversations ” taking place within the Twitter community. This launch will form part of their Service Cloud proposition, launched early 2009 by Salesforce, which started the migration towards embracing social networking by allowing companies to start tracking and engaging with Facebook participants who were discussing a particular company’s products or services..

The application itself was not our specific area of interest;  - what really got us thinking was the recognition that these conversations within the social networking communities are staring to have a real impact on businesses. That social networking capabilities are finding their way into enterprise solutions for business. Just as Web 2.0 technology such as mashups has found their way into enterprise technology solutions. Instead of attempting to guess or forecast what customers might like or dislike about existing products and services, by first listening to and then engaging in real life conversations taking place within social media, institutions can obtain real, actionable feedback. And, they must listen to customers where customers are gathering  - whether they are on Facebook, bebo, Twitter. 

So where to now for banks and financial services companies? We’ve set out our thoughts in this area in a number of research notes – most recently we have defined need for banks to develop their own coherent social media strategies in A Social Media Strategy for the Banking Industry . However we’re interested in your own thoughts on this matter. What role do you see for Twitter, Facebook and the like in helping to shape the financial services market? Can these social media sites really help customers to communicate more effectively about financial services products, or will such customer  discussions be restricted to the personal financial planning sites like Geezeo, Mint and Wesabe?  Will banks listen?

3 Comments »

Category: Customer operations     Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Ian Gilyeat   March 26, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    Connecting to the social networks is the easy part – structuring the data or analyziing the data from these many conversations will be a little more challenging. The is a good place for the semantic analysis to sink deep roots.

  • 2 Stessa Cohen   March 27, 2009 at 6:22 am

    Ian – thanks for your comment.I think you are right.in fact, what we’re seeing now on twitter are applications that aggregate or “curate” posts on a specific topic. But how to pull together more than 1 social network? Especially for an industry like banking?

  • 3 Before Banks Spend to Develop Mobile Applications, They Need to Think About Corporate Strategy and Resources   May 21, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    [...] For more on Mobile Financial strategies, take a look at this post below: Twitter: Going Beyond Chatter to Integrated Customer Service Tool [...]