David Armano noted in a recent Harvard Business Review post on social business that listening to conversations is a valuable step but only the beginning:

“The true opportunity lies in scaling and operationalizing “social”.”

Online customer support is one of the key trends confronting companies as they embrace social business and look to interact with their consumers online. The growth of social customer support is being driven by three key factors: increased uptake of social media broadly; highly visible success stories from other companies and an expectation of two-way interaction in social channels.

As social support grows in reach and popularity, companies are facing the conundrum of how to successfully scale. How do you deal with an environment where an unlimited number of people may look to you for swift, helpful service?

Here are eight pointers for scaling your customer support:

1. Shift from reactive to proactive + reactive

Listening and reacting isn’t enough. Edelman’s Trust Barometer shows that search engines are the #1 source of information about companies for informed consumers. So, win the search battle. Mine your support records for the most common support requests (through both online and traditional channels) and create searchable resources to address those queries.

These resources could be blog posts, knowledge base articles, videos, graphics, whatever (more on that later in this post) — just make sure they’re in the language of your customers, not in business jargon, and that people can link directly to them.

2. Triage

My apologies to the purists out there who think everyone should be treated equally, but if one person could cause a major issue for your company while another is lower-profile, I’m going to prioritize accordingly. Is that ideal? No. Is that completely egalitarian? No. Is it practical and realistic? You bet.

This means setting out your criteria for triage ahead of time. If you have tiered support in other channels you may already have some of this. Consider:

• Relative influence
• Severity of issue
• Spread of issue
• …etc.

3. Respond publicly when possible

The natural inclination for many companies is to take negative chatter offline ASAP. There are a couple of pitfalls to this approach:

1. The Internet doesn’t forget — others will be able to see the complaint, but no resolution
2. Other people with the same problem won’t benefit from the solution

There are many cases where you will have to take a conversation offline due to privacy needs around personal information, or due to legal regulations. Where those things aren’t the case, though, responding to concerns publicly accomplishes two things:

1. Allows anyone watching to see your company being responsive to an issue (improves your reputation)
2. The one:many nature of the Internet means that other people with that same issue can see the solution (scales your response)

4. Help customers to help customers

Companies like AT&T (rated highly for social support by Forrester) and BlackBerry (disclosure: client) have been successful at developing highly active support forums where customers interact with and help each other. While the company can step in and address unanswered questions, this solution means that many queries are addressed without any involvement from the company.

5. Build an army of advocates

Your social media activities will naturally let you identify your most active users and your biggest fans. Don’t ignore this potential; create programs to cultivate and build relationships with these people, empower them to become your ambassadors and reward them for doing so.

6. Know your customer

Different people have different preferences for how to receive service; this leads both to tailored interactions with people and to the development of different support mechanisms to suit their needs. People who are pressed for time and just want to get the answer with no frills may prefer quick step-by-step how-tos, for example, while others look for more social interaction and conversation. If you can, take the time (and/or money) to do the research to identify those needs.

Social CRM is a buzz term right now, but even if you’re not ready to go to that extent, there are plenty of tools that let you view your past interactions with people online and begin to move in that direction.

7. Structure for scale

While you may have a core group of support agents conducting support online, look to train and prepare a broader group of employees to step in during critical situations. Few companies are going to be able to take the Zappos approach to empowering employees, but by training outside your team you can be prepared for spikes in activity.

8. Plan strategically

Businesses don’t usually experience flat demand throughout the year. You’ll have seasonality; you’ll have spikes driven by announcements and launches; you’ll have marketing promotions. By knowing when those are, you can plan your resources accordingly – both in terms of staffing and in terms of proactive asset creation (see #1  above).

Scaling support remains a pressing problem for organizations. These approaches can help you to help more people, and in doing so raise satisfaction rates, reduce customer churn and improve your organization’s  reputation.

What tips would you add to the list?