Your service processes must be the same across all communication channels – traditional and social – in order to deliver a consistent experience and value proposition to your customer base. At the moment, this is downright hard to do, as almost no company offers a solution that tightly integrates the social and traditional communication channels. RightNow saw this need and has delivered a solution that allows customer support agents to engage with customers on Facebook.

Facebook has 500 million registered users that spend more than 3 billion hours a month on their site, says Nielsen. It’s a veritable interaction hub, where many businesses have a significant presence. Some have hundreds of thousands of fans. Other businesses have smaller, yet very loyal followings.

RightNow’s CX for Facebook product, to be released in November, will allow companies to install an app that creates a “Support” tab on their wall. Once a user (customer or prospect) clicks on this tab, they will be able to find answers from community content or from the corporate knowledgebase, ask the community questions, follow, participate and track discussions, propose an idea, ask an agent (either in a public or a private conversation), and more without leaving the Facebook site. Agents as well will be able to monitor and respond to wall posts: RightNow’s SmartSense sentiment analysis will be able to detect the tone of posts and flags high-priority comments for immediate follow-up.

This is great news. Companies will now be able to use Facebook in a way that’s integrated with their other communication channels instead of having to deploy a separate Facebook silo that relies on manual steps that diverge from standard customer service processes.

Best of all, any interaction over any channel becomes part of the universal customer history, which means that agents should have the information to better target a service interaction to the persona and past history of a customer.

RightNow’s Facebook app differentiates itself from others in the space by having a much more rounded set of engagement capabilities with community members and live agents. Consumers of today will be happy with this choice, which offers up service on their terms, any way they want it, from a platform that they really spend time on.