Organisations need to embrace social media now or risk alienating a growing proportion of customers, with analyst Gartner believing that by 2014 failure to respond to questions posed via social channels will be as bad as refusing to answer phone calls.

Customers, whether internal or external, have expectations regarding social media that businesses are failing to address, with Gartner finding that although more than half monitor social channels, only 23 per cent collect and analyse data.

According to Gartner, organisations need to create a framework to manage commentary and problems raised on social channels, as well as automating analytics to highlight trending issues, in the same way they do for traditional methods such as telephone and post.

“It’s crucial that organisations implement approaches to handling social media now. The effort involved in addressing social media commentary is not good cause to ignore relevant comments or solvable issues,” says Gartner vice president Carol Rozwell.