If you’re still trying to determine if your company should implement a social customer service program, you’re far, far behind your competitors. Customers are already using social media as customer contact channels, so if you’re not there, you’re not where your customers are. Your competitors likely are, though.

The term “social customer service” is striking fear into the hearts of companies everywhere. They know they need it, but they are likely unsure where to start. They may not have personnel on staff that are knowledgeable enough to put these programs into place, and they may not have a robust enough workforce to monitor social media.

Finding a place to start may be the trickiest task. But according to experts, starting with Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) is a good first step. According to research group Gartner, nearly three quarters of customers are using those two channels to contact companies.

According to Paul Anderson writing for Business2Community, industry leaders are those that recognize the value of these two channels in implementing social customer service. Anderson draws quotes from a recent survey and cites a VP of a leading multinational corporation, who writes:

‘’The use of Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert) by end-users is huge and the companies who still haven’t started using these channels are preparing to go down the hill. Remember you can come across many occasions when your customer will tweet you in the morning (stating the problem) and will contact your business contact center in the evening (to know the status of the problem). Without a Twitter customer service plan, your customer-service professional will answer the call unaware about the morning’s Twitter exchange. Needless to say, this will be a big blot on your company’s customer strategy.’’

If social media channels aren’t integrated into the primary customer relationship in the same way (for example) that you have blended the voice and e-mail channels in the contact center, then you will miss these contacts entirely, and look rather clueless when the customer contacts you via a second channel.

Some of the respondents in the survey cited by Anderson note that while larger companies may be “getting it” (and that’s a matter of opinion), social customer service is still a wasteland of knowledge for small to medium-sized companies, which are struggling to understand what social media channels to monitor and, more importantly, how to monitor them and who should be doing the work.

“Small and medium-sized business owners need to understand that unless you have the right combination of trained staff and enterprise application, you really cannot do much in social media,” wrote one social media consultant.

For smaller companies – indeed, for companies of any size – it’s clear that social media monitoring and communications belong in the contact center. If the social media channels must be integrated with other customer communications channels, then the contact center is the only place it makes sense to handle it.

Building a social media monitoring channel from scratch may sound daunting, but thanks to many of today’s cutting-edge contact center solutions, it may not be necessary. More than a few of them offer social media monitoring features already built in, allowing call centers to operate them as simply another channel in the multimedia mix. This takes a lot of pressure off smaller businesses in particular, who know they should be doing something about social media – but they’re not sure what.