Guest Contributor: Pauline E.M. Hoogervorst

Many organizations are focusing now on their social media strategy and organizing the daily operations of these new channels. But how are you organizing this? Did you appoint a webcare team? And if you already did, is your webcare team integrated in your contact center?

I have been thinking a lot about company and their strategies, complemented with lots of reading - the latest book "Googled".

Given our current economic situations, a lot of companies have been trying to adjust their businesses. The problem has always been that if a company has built a good long-term strategy, why change it now? It is either a good strategy or not.

Gartner's has made their predictions for the top 10 consumer mobile applications for 2012, as published in PC Today magazine. Interestingly, from our perspective, there seems to be a customer bias at the heart of their choices. Gartner's criteria was based on "revenue, loyalty, business model, consumer value and estimated market penetration."

What we found interesting in Gartner's Top 10 Consumer Mobile Applications were:

   1. Location-based services: creating context sensitive services e.g. airports, airlines

   2. Near field communications: customer' choice for ID & authentication e.g. boarding passes, payments

   3. Mobile advertising: hopefully not 'more of the same' push model ads - let's get creative

From our perspective, if you want to focus on customers, you'll need to deploy customer focus systems and procedures. And critically, you had better equip your sales team with customer-oriented systems, not just the old paper-based databases masquerading as CRM systems.