Social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut are now being used for more than just fining old buddies or making new ones. According to independent market analysis firm Datamonitor, companies of all sizes have begun to engage customers and prospects on social networking services.

Though this trend is largely marketing oriented, some leading edge companies have started to offer customer service and support through social networking. This, according to the firm’s new report ‘The Rise of Social Networking and Emerging Channels in Customer Service’, has started companies thinking of ways to connect their key customer service resource—the contact center—to social networks.

“Given the boom in popularity of social networks, enterprises of all stripes have started to look for ways to market their brands to potential customers through these services,” says Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor and the report’s author.

The increased corporate presence on these networks has also led to service interactions between company and customer. Some of these interactions result from a direct contact from a customer to a company (akin to a phone call into a contact center). But with new social media monitoring tools, companies have also begun to inject themselves into customer conversations. If, for example, a customer complains to the world at large about poor service, the company being complained about proactively reaches out to the customer to try to solve the issue.

“When done properly, social network-based customer service interactions drive increased intimacy between company and customer,” says Jacobs. “Customers feel that the company listens to, understands and cares about their preferences.”

According to Datamonitor there is a clear opportunity for customer interaction technology providers to create solutions that provide scalability for these support operations, primarily by allowing formal contact center environments to handle some or all of these interactions. There are, of course, numerous technological, business process and cultural hurdles to overcome before this model can gain a strong foothold in the enterprise market.

Jacobs concludes: “Social networks will not be a flash-in-the-pan craze and will not simply disappear or burn themselves out. Companies that choose to simply ignore this trend will relegate themselves to the outdated, fuddy-duddy camp—an important distinction depending on a company’s desired demographic—and more worryingly, maybe even to obsolescence.”