10 Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools

Zendesk is adding Facebook integration that allows agents to monitor and respond to posts on a company's Facebook wall, which show up in the system as support tickets.

Zendesk for Facebook is a new feature of the online helpdesk and customer service product, included in all editions. A Zendesk for Twitter capability was introduced in January and works by monitoring brand and product mentions that can be fed to agents to respond, if necessary. On Facebook, Zendesk can pull in all of the posts on a company's Facebook page, allowing agents to monitor which ones require a response. In both cases, Zendesk is also providing a "bulk response" option allowing support agents to send a reply to multiple people who are raising the same issue.

"If you go to a Facebook page or Twitter stream and try to deal with the messages one at a time, you can easily be overwhelmed," Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker said. "This is one more tool for the tool chest to make it easy." Large brands still face the challenge of casting too wide a net and gathering "more information than you can possibly deal with," but can fine tune their approach by tweaking their filters, he said.

[ Make your phone reps more efficient and helpful to customers. See Web Support Tech Makes Call Center Reps Smarter. ]

Zendesk built its business as a helpdesk tool for technical support and has broadened its reach over time to address other sorts of customer service and support by email and chat, as well as the need for customer support in social channels. This year, Zendesk added voice as another channel, and scaled up from its base in startups and small businesses to add an enterprise edition.

Earlier this month, Zendesk also updated its Android client for service agents, which now includes support for Android tablets.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard

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