Facebook CRM Applications Track User Communications, Preferences

I’ve already written about how companies have started to integrate Twitter into the customer service environment. Now, I’ve got a press release on my desk about a company that is launching a Facebook CRM application for contact centers.

It turns out that they’re not the only ones trying to catch the trend of communicating with friends through Facebook instead of via e-mail. Programmers and CRM software developers have been tinkering with the ability to bring customer relationship management tools to the service’s open programming platform for at least a year.

Some of the Facebook CRM applications on the market work like middleware. They actually handle inbound Facebook messages the same way as incoming e-mail. Service agents can import customer requests from Facebook mail, open tickets, and even collect personal data provided by site members.

Newer Facebook CRM applications take advantage of API connections between Facebook and a company’s CRM software. By saving a user’s profile page as a field within a contact, agents can help automate the process of following up on transactions or scanning user status updates for alerts.

Privacy advocates have raised concerns about what happens when companies start logging the personal information shared through social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. CRM software programmers note that Facebook’s API prevents them from violating the site’s privacy policy. Facebook users set their own privacy profiles through their personal preference settings. They also control the amount of information that “friends” can access. Therefore, companies can only review information that site users allow them to see. However, logging a customer’s live feed of data might inadvertently store information that might later be deleted from a site’s servers, creating potential copyright issues.

For companies that want to learn more about customers while responding to questions and concerns in a familiar context, tracking Facebook through CRM software appears to be a promising, new frontier.