Some companies might dabble in social media, but it’s a rare few that bet their entire business on it. Conversocial is one of those few. The company brings social media into the contact center for a more unified customer experience.

Having a dedicated customer service team for social media is still a novel concept for most companies, but more are recognizing the need for dedicated social customer support. And Conversocial, just three years old itself, is at the forefront of this emerging market. “This area has a lot of room to expand as companies mature their strategies and operations for social customer care,” says Kate Leggett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

As social media developed, the marketing and PR departments in B2C companies took up the challenge, using the channel to gauge consumer sentiment and communicate to customers. Under this model, customer service requests are often handled by giving the tweeter an email address or phone number to call. Conversocial saw a better way.

“You can’t community manage someone who needs a refund; you need to give them real customer service agents who can give them a refund. The only way companies could provide the level of customer service that was needed was to move social into the contact center,” says Conversocial CEO Joshua March.

Moving beyond the initial social media monitoring or outreach campaigns commonly used by marketers and public relations professionals, Conversocial’s technology is specifically designed for customer service interactions. The solution provides analysis for response times and average handle times as well as the ability to adhere to service-level agreements (SLAs).

“They have a robust agent desktop, supervisor tools, and reporting to manage and monitor social operations,” Leggett notes. Conversocial can show how incoming content compares to average volume, or heighten the importance of requests made by influencers with a high number of followers. The product is “intended for customer service, so it has innate workflow, assignment, and prioritization. It’s designed for social engagement, versus broader CRM applications which can be weighed down with legacy information,” says Jenny Sussin, a Gartner analyst specializing in social CRM.

Using natural language processing and machine learning, Conversocial filters unrelated messages, identifying tweets that are most likely to be customer service requests. Now the development team is turning its attention to intelligently threading those conversations together. Over the past several months, the company has been building out a new tool, Conversations, that pulls together multiple tweets or Facebook comments into a single case. Conversocial also plans to build direct connections to CRM systems in order to better integrate with its customers’ existing data ecosystems.

The company is growing fast, adding 60 clients in 2013, bringing its list to 150. Its customer mix leans toward B2C verticals such as retailers, banks, and travel companies. ­Clients include Tesco, Coach, BarclayCard, and Hertz. A former Hertz customer service executive recently joined the team, helping new client companies plan rollouts.

Conversocial’s biggest challenge won’t be building a compelling product, but encouraging companies to make the jump to handling social media in the contact center. “Social customer care in many companies is still under the purview of marketing, which lacks the operational discipline of managing incidents to SLAs that contact center personnel do so well,” Leggett says. “There aren’t many dedicated social customer service platforms. We’re keen to promote the space,” March says. “We think we see a clear route, a progression of social maturity, where social starts out purely in the marketing department and moves into customer service. Part of our mission is to help companies get to that stage and push the market forward.” —Sarah Sluis