If you're a company with a brand-new Facebook page and you're nervous about administering it and keeping up with the volume and type of customer contact you're going to get, Facebook may be able to help you. TechCrunch is reporting today that Facebook is integrating a new feature from startup Freshdesk into its features.
Freshdesk , an online help desk solutions company, helps businesses better manage their customer service. It works through more traditional media such as email and phone, but it's also designed to work through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now it’s integrating with the messaging feature that is part of the new Brand Pages that Facebook launched in February, according to TechCrunch. In these new pages, users can send a private message to a company for the first time, and companies can respond to the messages.
Many companies are finding managing the social media channel to be extremely challenging. For starters, the stakes are high: one ignored Facebook post from a disgruntled customer looks bad – really, really bad, depending on how many people visit a company's Facebook page. Secondly, many companies haven't yet figured out who in the organization should manage the social media channels: marketing isn't necessarily equipped for the kind of real-time response social media requires, and the contact center often isn't equipped to bring the social media channels into the more traditional communications media mix.
And while many companies do have a robust way to service customers via social media, the channel just isn't appropriate for some things: communicating private customer information, for example. TechCrunch points out that this FreshDesk integration will allow customers and companies to communicate over details such as passwords or credit card numbers.
“Companies are probably using those private messages for customer service already, but Freshdesk says it’s the first customer support platform to offer this kind of integration, allowing businesses to manage these messages in the same interface as all of their other customer communication. I suspect competitors will be following suit,” writes TechCrunch.