This is interesting. I just made my post yesterday about Social Networking and the help desk and I hear about a vendor who has integrated some sort of social media into a help desk software product. In this case, ManageEngine integrated Twitter with the customer help desk software.

A little background first. When customers feel satisfied or frustrated, they generally vent out their feelings and opinions by calling support or emailing them. If they don’t get any response, they blog about their experiences. With Twitter, it just became easier. 140 characters is all it takes to capture the attention of an enterprise like Dell or Southwest. The Twitter revolution took enterprises by surprise when they were dragged into conversations they never initiated. The 140 characters customers and prospects were tweeting was all over the place and companies found themselves closely monitoring social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn to see what people were saying about them.

Companies like Comcast, Southwest and Dell have been known for tracking conversations in social media that involve their products or brand and responding to these users appropriately. If it is praise, a simple thank-you from the company can go a long way. But when addressing a complaint or an issue, the company can put out the flame before it becomes a fire.

But how do customer service departments keep track of such tweets? You can either hire someone to keep a watch on Twitter 24×7 and there are tools that can help you do that too (like Tweetdeck and Seesmic). But these tools don’t keep track (store) of these customer outbursts (not in all cases). So it made sense for customer support software to keep track of these tweets. That is exactly what ManageEngine is trying to do. ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is a web-based customer support help desk software with request management, contact management, knowledge base, self service portal and remote control. The new version of SupportCenter Plus integrates with Twitter to keep track of relevant conversations that are happening on the social media platform.

Vinu Sreedharan, product manager at ManageEngine said in the company press release, “The new features in this release will help customer service departments reduce that time and increase overall effectiveness.  We have seen ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus transform customer help desk departments and the new enhancements are really our response to customer feedback. We are excited about the new Twitter integration as it allows not just the customer service department to keep track of questions but can also greatly aid organizations in their need to keep track of public image and branding.”

The new software helps support organizations identify and keep track of relevant conversations about their products and/or company. I personally think this is important because channels of communication have really opened up in today’s connected world. Keeping track of all your customer engagements is important and it is just a matter of time, when more vendors are going to integrate these channels into their offerings. This is going to benefit companies and enterprises keep track of all that the customers are saying wherever they are saying it. The best part is that end users are open to use any channel of communication they want and they can expect better customer service from organizations.

Pricing for the new software from ManageEngine starts at US$495 for two support reps.

How is Twitter affecting your organization? Are you seeing your customers use new social media to communicate across to you? If yes, what are you doing about it? Let us know in the comments below.