Found in 2007 and based out of Detroit, Michigan, 3CSI offers a social media management solution called CustomerConnect. Their solution was built under a very strong Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) framework, especially for the auto industry and large enterprises. The solution is sold as stand alone product, but the added value of 3CSI is the services they provide from strategy to quality control of the engagement with the end-consumer.  The 3CSI team has customer service experience that was transferred to social media, and this is the foundation of CustomerConnect.

The company has 25 employees with both COPC and CSAT experience. This experience brings a deep domain expertise not seen in other vendors. Today they have more than 5 customers in the auto industry managing large volume of discussions and mentions. You can say that they provide Social CRM for the auto industry but are considering other industries such as sports and entertainment. They have been able to increase revenue and their average renewal contract is 3 years.  Pricing is based on configuration and volume of data with unlimited number of users.

Having to deal with large volume of data in the auto industry has allowed 3CSI to become experts on filtering social media noise and providing workflow to improve loyalty and customer advocacy --- making CustomerConnection a prevailing solution.

CustomerConnection allows you to filter social media conversations via analytics and keyword searches that direct conversations to queues in order to be tagged and managed. The solution provides specific a broad range of functionality to manage the conversations:

1. Skill-based routing
2. Workflow
3. Alerts
4. Transaction Monitoring
5. Data Archiving
6. Tags
7. Monitor Influencers
8. Monitor Pinterest, WordPress and Yahoo!Answers
9. Twitter Firehose
10. Crawlers with Adaptive Search and Targeted Domains

The adaptive search helps to go beyond keyword searches; it uses a series of functions like probability-based, entry categorization and post priorities. The technology allows having more targeted and expandable data results.

Figure 1- Queues in CustomerConnection

Part of CustomerConnection is also the PerformanceTracking module, which provides the ability to:

1. Coach and mentor agents
2. Have quality monitoring
3. Have real-time monitoring

Figure 2- Realtime Monitoring

3CSI has done a nice job combining the filtering of conversations with queues and workflows. The workflow is a distinctive functionality based on their customer satisfaction and auto industry experience. Their customers have been able to decrease 11% overall call volume due to to the filtering and workflow functionality.

In terms of CRM integration, CustomerConnect provides connections with Siebel, Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM. This means that agents can create cases, view contact history, lead tracking, monitor influencers and track social profiles between systems.

Something unique from 3CSI is the fact they have combined "workflow" and "engagement" in the product. Part of this “workflow” and “engagement” is to improve their product with better business intelligence capabilities. The technology roadmap includes:

1. New Business Intelligence modules: Insights Database and Interactive Analytics
2. PerformanceTracker: Add Campaign Management and Earn Media tracking
3. CustomerConnect: Improve customer experience lifecycle with more CSAT functionality

The opportunities for 3CSI will be when they branch out to other industries and sectors; the auto industry experience can easily be translated to other industries such as retail, sports, entertainment and restaurants. In terms of the product roadmap they should include integrations to community platforms like Lithium and Jive; plus consider connectors to knowledge management solutions.

3CSI offers something unique in the market, a social media solution designed from the customer satisfaction point of view.

Reviewed by CRM Idol 2012 Primary Judges