My belief is that at the end of all of these thought processes is a single word. Advocacy.
To maintain any semblance of the current quality levels and ratios existing in social media customer service will require an army of advocates that become your first tier support. Your de-facto forum leaders as it were. On the marketing side they'll need to launch tiered recognition programs for their most valued advocates who become a portion of their marketing arm. Sales will need long sales cycles based on establishing trust relationships, yet require a means of expanding that circle of trust as quickly as possible, customer advocates will be a primary way that occurs.
To that end I believe a new sector of tools will need to emerge for managing this base of customer advocates, Social Advocate Management Systems (SAMS) for lack of a better term. While the word "social" is plugged into the beginning, I want to be clear that I mean the word in the relationship sense, not in the sense of "social tools" like twitter, etc. Yes, those tools will be initial focal points, but the concept is not dependent upon them.
These advocates will come to represent far more than just a recommender of a product, more than just a "influencer", and be far more critical to a companies success. It will be necessary to insure that you are monitoring, communicating, developing, and rewarding these advocates at a much, much deeper level. Yet the management of an effective advocate program goes beyond existing CRM, or proposed SCRM systems that I'm currently aware of. I do however envision the possibility of incorporating SAMS functionality into these products. The complexity of such a system on its face may appear similar to an advanced affiliate system, but it is far more involved than that. There are the subtleties of indirect influencer type activities for example, as well as direct hands-on quantifiable activities (customer service, sale facilitation, etc.) by the advocate. Properly determining, predicting, and rewarding the value an advocate brings is critical but not easy to do. In addition, you must balance the level of reward with the "type" of advocate. If there are rewards of actual monetary value for example, detecting a true advocate vs. someone simply seeking enough volume activity to qualify for the reward might be necessary. The latter, while perhaps influential in the short term, actually represents less value to your organization and has less incentive to provide quality interactions.
We've executed advocacy programs in traditional marketing for years, why is this so different? Because historically those programs are campaign driven exercises, there were always finite start and stop periods of internal focus on the program. You execute, you collect your data, you analyze your data, you publish your results, and you move on to the next creative endeavor. In the social world, it is a never ending cycle of constant development and evolution or relationships. There is no "end". This means we need a better lens through which to view and manage our advocates, better metrics, behavioral analysis, automated reward systems, etc. so that we can offer the highest level of value to these advocates (with the least number of people). So yes, it's complex, but at least it's far easier to build than a "sentiment analysis" system that actually works for example.
So this is my vision of what comes after SCRM, what's yours?
Cheers,
Matt Ridings – @techguerilla