Ruth Bastedo is Director, Business Development at Social Media Group. Follow @rutbas

This week I was at a talk by Howard Grosfield, the President of Amex Bank of Canada at the Toronto Board of Trade. I was really impressed by how Amex considers social media to be an intrinsic part of future of the customer experience. Grosfield emphasized again and again how important it is for Amex to have customers willfully and actively promote American Express, especially through social media. It goes without saying that in order to encourage this type of advocacy, the quality of the customer service experience is of paramount importance.

You can get a taste of Mr. Grosfield’s take on the importance of customer service to Amex by taking a peek at an excerpt from another talk he recently did at Rotman School of Management, “Selling Service: Building a Brand on the Foundations of Service and the Customer Experience”.

The talk got me thinking about link between customer experience and social media. I revisited discussions in the LinkedIn Group “Customer Experience Management”, to see how much talk there was on the social media front. Social Media is clearly popping up as a factor that is being examined more closely by many companies.

On the SMG front, increasingly our clients are interested in integrating social channels into their customer’s experiences, and moreover, they are interested in providing value add content that supports these experiences in a  more holistic and cohesive manner.

For an overview of the space, I urge you to take a look at this great set of info-graphics, “The 10 Best Customer Service Infographics for 2012” sourced by one of the LinkedIn group members. It’s a really excellent perspective of what’s happening out there, and gives lots of food for thought.

This is a taste of the content below. Enjoy!!